Fixing PHPStorm when Git Stops Responding

PHPStorm suddenly stopped recognizing my git repository. I cleared the cache, restarted the IDE, but nothing helped. I jumped to my terminal, ran git from the command line, and everything worked fine there. Confusing, right?

Let me explain why this happened and how I fixed it for good.

After the cache clear and restart didn’t help, I needed to commit and push some changes. So I did that from the command line - no issues at all. When I went back to PHPStorm, I noticed a small notification I had missed before - it was asking me to accept the Xcode command line tools license agreement. I accepted it, restarted PHPStorm, and git was back.

But why did the command line work when PHPStorm didn’t?

Two gits on macOS

On macOS, there can be two versions of git. There’s the one that comes with Apple’s Xcode command line tools (at /usr/bin/git) and there’s one I chose to install through Homebrew (at /opt/homebrew/bin/git) because it was more up to date at the time. My terminal uses the Homebrew version because of my shell’s PATH configuration. PHPStorm, by default, uses /usr/bin/git - Apple’s version.

When Apple’s git can’t run because the Xcode license hasn’t been accepted, PHPStorm’s git integration breaks entirely. But my terminal git keeps working because it’s a completely different binary.

Fixing this in PHPStorm

Accepting the license got me working again, but to prevent this from happening in the future, I pointed PHPStorm at my Homebrew git instead.

• Run which git. You should see something like /opt/homebrew/bin/git.

• In PHPStorm, go to Settings → Version Control → Git.

• In the Path to Git executable field, replace the default /usr/bin/git with your Homebrew path.

• Click the Test button next to the path to verify it works. You should see a success message with the git version.

• Click Apply and OK.

Now PHPStorm uses the same git binary as your terminal. No more surprise breakages when Apple decides you need to re-accept a license agreement.