gastownhall/beads · error

invalid URL: %w

Error message

invalid URL: %w

What it means

canonicalizeGitURL parses URLs containing "://" with net/url to normalize them for fingerprinting. If url.Parse rejects the string, the parse error is wrapped as "invalid URL". This indicates the git remote value is not a syntactically valid absolute URL.

Source

Thrown at internal/beads/fingerprint.go:83

	}

	repoURL := strings.TrimSpace(string(output))
	canonical, err := canonicalizeGitURL(repoURL)
	if err != nil {
		return "", "", fmt.Errorf("failed to canonicalize URL: %w", err)
	}

	hash := sha256.Sum256([]byte(canonical))
	return hex.EncodeToString(hash[:16]), RepoIDSourceRemote, nil
}

func canonicalizeGitURL(rawURL string) (string, error) {
	rawURL = strings.TrimSpace(rawURL)

	if strings.Contains(rawURL, "://") {
		u, err := url.Parse(rawURL)
		if err != nil {
			return "", fmt.Errorf("invalid URL: %w", err)
		}

		host := strings.ToLower(u.Hostname())
		if port := u.Port(); port != "" && port != "22" && port != "80" && port != "443" {
			host = host + ":" + port
		}

		path := strings.TrimRight(u.Path, "/")
		path = strings.TrimSuffix(path, ".git")
		path = filepath.ToSlash(path)

		return host + path, nil
	}

	// Detect scp-style URLs: [user@]host:path
	// Must contain ":" before any "/" and not be a Windows path
	colonIdx := strings.Index(rawURL, ":")
	slashIdx := strings.Index(rawURL, "/")

View on GitHub (pinned to 71377f2769)

Solutions

1. Run `git remote set-url origin <valid-url>` with a correctly formed URL
2. Validate the URL first (paste it into a browser or `python3 -c "import urllib.parse;urllib.parse.urlparse('...')"`)
3. Strip whitespace/control characters before configuring the remote
4. Check for shell quoting issues that embedded stray characters into .git/config

Example fix

// before
git remote set-url origin "https://github.com/acme/repo.git "
// after
git remote set-url origin "$(echo 'https://github.com/acme/repo.git' | tr -d '[:space:]')"

_, err := url.Parse(rawRemote)
if err != nil {
    // remote URL invalid; fix before calling bd APIs
}

id, err := beads.ComputeRepoIDForPath(path)
if err != nil && strings.Contains(err.Error(), "invalid URL") {
    return fmt.Errorf("remote URL unparseable; re-set it: %w", err)
}

When it happens

Trigger: ComputeRepoIDForPathWithSource → canonicalizeGitURL with a remote URL that contains "://" but fails url.Parse (invalid characters, malformed scheme/authority, control characters). Also directly exercised by TestCanonicalizeGitURL_Whitespace with malformed inputs.

Common situations: Typos like `https://git hub.com/repo` (space in host); stray characters or trailing whitespace/control chars from shell paste; a non-URL string in the remote slot that happens to contain "://".

Related errors

• unexpected git rev-parse output
• failed to canonicalize URL: %w
• not a git repository
• failed to install hooks: %w
• git config --unset core.hooksPath failed: %w (output: %s)

AI-assisted analysis of gastownhall/beads@71377f2769 (2026-08-30). Data as JSON: /api/errors/94cfb89d719e674b. Report an issue: GitHub.