rsync over ssh "error in protocol data stream" (code 12). ssh works

You can also get this error if you specify a remote path that doesn't exist.

I got this error on OS X:

$ rsync -avz public/ static:apps/myapp.com
building file list ... done
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (8 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/rsync/rsync-47/rsync/io.c(453) [sender=2.6.9]

Turned it was simply a matter of mistyping the destination path. The apps dir didn't exist. When I changed that to static:sites/myapp.com instead (the sites dir did exist), the error went away.

It's fine if the final directory in the path doesn't exist (I could do static:sites/mynewapp.com) but it appears any preceding directory must already exist.

I got this error when rsync wasn't installed on the target host. The error message in my case also said rsync: command not found. A simple

sudo apt-get install rsync

on the target host solved the problem.

Does your login script at the remote end produce garbage on stdout? Check this with

ssh -p YY me@XXXXX /bin/true > out.txt

If out.txt contains data, identify the offending statements in your .profile or .bashrc and wrap them in

if [ ! -t 1 ]; then
  echo garbage
fi