[On-Prem] Cannot switch to developement mode or create a new project on 23.6+

[nourad]

Hi Everyone,

I'm Noura a TSE here at google. Starting 23.6, we have a breaking change for our on-premise customers where git 2.39.1+ must be installed on the machine where Looker is hosted. Worktree provide the benefit for a faster entry into development mode among other benefits and is not supported on older git version like 1.8. You can verify your git version as follow :

git --version

If git is not installed you may face the following issue

• Cannot switch into development mode
• Cannot create a new project (either return a 500 error page or see below screenshot) 

How to resolve this issue? 

The first step is to verify that git is installed on the server and verify the git version (git --version) 

If the git version is 1.8 or below 2.3, please download the latest git release: https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=git 

If git is already installed on your server and you have the correct version, verify the looker logs. 

Looker logs are generally situated in this file path /home/looker/log/ and run the following command:

$ grep "Cannot allocate memory" looker.log

If you see an error along those line

:: Errno::ENOMEM : Cannot allocate memory - Cannot allocate memory - cd /mnt/lookershare/models-user-x/testproject && git something[...]

You will need to run the following command:

$ sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=1​

For persistence add this line `vm.overcommit_memory=1` to `/etc/sysctl.conf` file and restart the VM for the change to take effect. 

Feel free to reach out to our support team if you still face any issue. 

Best,

Noura