Cloning or pulling from a Git repository used in vRealize Orchestrator fails on Windows

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

This article aims to provide steps which should be used to clean up an integrated with vRealize Orchestrator remote Git repository, which contains files with special characters in their names, in case users would like to perform git clone or git pull operation against the repository.

Symptoms:

• When attempting to perform a git clone operation on your local Windows machine with your remote Git repository, which you have integrated with vRealize Orchestrator, you receive an error similar to

Cloning into '<repository>'…
remote: Enumerating objects: 44, done.
remote: Total 44 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 44
Receiving objects: 100% (44/44), 4.50 KiB | 4.50 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (4/4), done.
fatal: cannot create directory at '<path-to-an-object-with-special-characters-in-its-name>': Invalid argument
warning: Clone succeeded, but checkout failed.
You can inspect what was checked out with 'git status'
and retry with 'git restore --source=HEAD :/'

• When attempting to pull the latest changes on your local Windows machine from the working remote branch of your remote Git repository, which you have integrated with vRealize Orchestrator, you receive an error similar to

  remote: Enumerating objects: 17, done.
  remote: Counting objects: 100% (17/17), done.
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (8/8), done.
  remote: Total 12 (delta 1), reused 2 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
  Unpacking objects: 100% (12/12), 1.34 KiB | 17.00 KiB/s, done.
  From <repository-url>
     <commit-SHA-1>..<commit-SHA-2>  <branch-name> -> <remote-name>/<branch-name>
  fatal: cannot create directory at '<path-to-an-object-with-special-characters-in-its-name>': Invalid argument

Environment

VMware vRealize Orchestrator 8.x

Cause

Your Git repository contains some vRealize Orchestrator objects which were created with special characters in their name (<, >, ", :, ?, |), or their names end with either a whitespace character, or a period character (.). Affected content objects could be Workflows, Policies and/or content object categories (folders).

Resolution

See the Workaround section below for additional information.

Workaround:

1. Log in with an Administrator user to the web client of a vRealize Orchestrator instance that you have configured with the affected remote Git repository.
2. Navigate to the affected vRealize Orchestrator content object which contains special characters in its name and/or its name ends with either a whitespace character, or a period character.
3. Rename the affected vRealize Orchestrator content object to not contain the special characters in its name. Remove trailing whitespace characters or any period characters at the end of the content object’s name.
4. Navigate to the Git History tab.
5. Click on Push.
6. Select all of the affected and changed vRealize Orchestrator content objects.
7. Click on Push to push the changes to your configured remote Git repository.

Note: These changes might need to be pushed to other remote branches as well.