Symptoms

The following appears when trying to clone the repository in Bitbucket Server:

fatal: http://user@example.com:7990/scm/PROJECT/repo.git/info/refs not valid: is this a git repository?

Diagnosis

Certain combinations of git and libcurl don't cope with the response body Bitbucket Server used to return up to version 2.0.3.

GIT Version	Curl version	Works?
<= 1.7.12.2	7.19.7
1.7.12.3	7.19.7
1.8.0.2	7.19.7
1.7.12.3	7.28.1
1.8.0.2	7.28.1

This seems to particularly affect CentOS which ships with somewhat old versions of libcurl. E.g. CentOS 6.3 with curl-devel-7.19.7; CentOS 5.8 with curl-devel-7.15.5.

Workaround: Preferred: upgrade to Bitbucket Server 2.0.3 or 2.1 or higher. If that isn't possible, please use a version of git that is known to work or compile git against a more recent version of libcurl.

Libcurl:

curl -OL http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.28.1.tar.gz
tar xfz curl-7.28.1.tar.gz
cd curl-7.28.1
./configure --enable-http --prefix=/opt/curl-7.28.1
make
sudo make install

git:

make configure
./configure --prefix=/opt/git-1.8.0.2 --with-curl=/opt/curl-7.28.1
make
sudo make install

Cause

This is a combination of behaviour in Bitbucket Server  BSERV-2966 - Getting issue details... STATUS  with certain combinations of git and curl.

Workaround

Use Git Client version 1.7.12.2 or lower to connect to Bitbucket Server.

Resolution

Upgrade to Bitbucket Server 2.0.3+ that has fixed the bug.