What causes "Got too many results (%s) for commit "%s", expected %s." in phacility/phabricator?

Check for duplicates: SELECT phid, COUNT(*) AS n FROM repository_commit GROUP BY phid HAVING n > 1;

phacility/phabricator · error · Exception

Got too many results (%s) for commit "%s", expected %s.

Error message

Got too many results (%s) for commit "%s", expected %s.

What it means

Thrown by PhabricatorRepositoryCommit::newCommitRef(), which calls the internal.commit.search Conduit method constrained to a single commit PHID inside one repository (src/applications/repository/storage/PhabricatorRepositoryCommit.php:537-567). Because PHIDs are globally unique, the result set must contain exactly one record; more than one means the storage or query layer returned duplicate commit rows for one PHID. This is an invariant/data-integrity violation, not a user mistake, and is effectively unreachable on a healthy install.

Source

Thrown at src/applications/repository/storage/PhabricatorRepositoryCommit.php:561

      array(
        'constraints' => array(
          'repositoryPHIDs' => array($repository->getPHID()),
          'phids' => array($this->getPHID()),
        ),
      ));
    $result = $future->resolve();

    $commit_display = $this->getMonogram();

    if (empty($result['data'])) {
      throw new Exception(
        pht(
          'Unable to retrieve details for commit "%s"!',
          $commit_display));
    }

    if (count($result['data']) !== 1) {
      throw new Exception(
        pht(
          'Got too many results (%s) for commit "%s", expected %s.',
          phutil_count($result['data']),
          $commit_display,
          1));
    }

    $record = head($result['data']);
    $ref_record = idxv($record, array('fields', 'ref'));

    if (!$ref_record) {
      throw new Exception(
        pht(
          'Unable to retrieve CommitRef record for commit "%s".',
          $commit_display));
    }

    return DiffusionCommitRef::newFromDictionary($ref_record);

View on GitHub (pinned to 5720a38cfe)

Solutions

Check for duplicates: SELECT phid, COUNT(*) AS n FROM repository_commit GROUP BY phid HAVING n > 1;
Deduplicate the rows (keep the canonical row), after taking a backup
Verify the unique index on the phid column exists and repair the table
If no duplicates exist, audit custom extensions that alter Diffusion commit search or conduit parameter handling

Example fix

-- before (diagnose)
SELECT phid, COUNT(*) AS n FROM repository_commit GROUP BY phid HAVING n > 1;

-- after (repair: keep the lowest id per PHID)
DELETE c1 FROM repository_commit c1
JOIN repository_commit c2 ON c1.phid = c2.phid AND c1.id > c2.id;

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

$rows = id(new DiffusionCommitQuery())
  ->setViewer(PhabricatorUser::getOmnipotentUser())
  ->withPHIDs(array($commit->getPHID()))
  ->execute();
if (count($rows) !== 1) {
  // integrity problem: do not call newCommitRef()
  return;
}

Try / catch

try {
  $ref = $commit->newCommitRef($viewer);
} catch (Exception $ex) {
  // Duplicate rows for one PHID: log the PHID and treat as a data-integrity
  // incident; do not retry, the input cannot succeed until the DB is fixed.
  phlog($ex);
  throw new PhabricatorWorkerPermanentFailureException($ex->getMessage());
}

Prevention

Keep the unique index on repository_commit.phid intact; never bypass it with manual SQL
Take consistent backups so partial restores cannot produce half-duplicated rows
Audit any extension that alters conduit parameters for internal.commit.search

When it happens

Trigger: Calling $commit->newCommitRef($viewer) when the repository_commit table contains multiple rows with the same PHID (manual SQL edits, crashed migration, partial DB restore), or when a custom extension corrupts the constraints passed to internal.commit.search so more than one commit matches.

Common situations: Database restored from a partial or inconsistent backup; administrators duplicating commit rows with INSERT ... SELECT; third-party plugins hooking DiffusionQuery or the conduit layer. Never occurs during normal git/hg/svn import.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of phacility/phabricator@5720a38cfe (2026-08-21). Data as JSON: /api/errors/70adb82ba35dc099. Report an issue: GitHub.