What to Do If GitHub Desktop Cannot Find Your Repositories

I use GitHub Desktop since it was called GitHub for Windows. In those 8 years I never had problems with this Git client – at least until a few days ago where nothing worked at all.

It started as I tried to push to one of my Git repositories at GitHub. Instead of synchronising my changes, GitHub Desktop asked if I want to create a remote repository. I expected that my login token was no longer valid. Therefore, I signed out and logged in to get a new one. That did not change anything. I put this problem aside and tried to clone another one of my repositories. However, the list of my GitHub repositories was empty.

To keep working I needed to fix this problem. Many instructions I found on Google did not solve my problem. The only thing that worked at the end was this sequence from issue #5659.

  1. Close GitHub Desktop
  2. Remove everything in the folder %APPDATA%\GitHub Desktop\
  3. Restart GitHub Desktop

I needed to login once more and drag & drop my repositories in the client, but otherwise everything was back to normal. Should you experience similar problems I suggest you follow this sequence to get GitHub Desktop back to work.

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