Cloing project templates sometimes fails with an unhelpful error message

[dillongrove]

System: M1 MacBook Air

Running the create project command gives me:

% snap proj myproj
x Clone project template
could not find commit hash for main
ERROR: MISSING_REF

Some research indicates that this likely a problem with degit which is used to fetch project templates:
Rich-Harris/degit#37

Note that git is installed and available on PATH on this machine. Per the suggestion in the issue linked above, setting cache: false in degit options does seem to fix this issue in a pinch. However, that might not be a good long-term solution.

Others suggest that the XCode Command Line Utilities might need to be installed on Mac for this work. This machine actually does not have those installed, so I will try that soon and see if it works with cache: true. If so, we could make this part of the installation instructions.

Alternatively, we could look into other methods of fetching project templates (gittar is one that apparently has similar functionality but doesn't depend on git).

[dillongrove]

Per conversation on 7/26/2021:
Try setting force: true, deleting cache, and trying again

[jasongitmail]

Actually, instead, try clearing contents of ~/.degit and running npm install in the snapp-cli dir again. Then trying the command that caused the error.

[jasongitmail]

I ended up using gittar to implement the example command b/c using two degit's calls felt like it'd get messy with its event emitter syntax.

It works well. I'm down to use gittar to work around this issue. Its syntax will end up slightly cleaner & looks like we'll be able to set it up for offline usage.

[jasongitmail]

Fixed. Switched to gittar.