What s the best practice to git clone into an existing folder

Question

I have a working copy of the project  without any source control meta data  Now  I d like to do the equivalent of git-clone into this folder  and keep my local changes   git-clone doesn t allow me to clone into an existing folder  What is the best practice here

User · Answer

Don t clone  fetch instead  In the repo   git init git remote add origin  url of clone source git fetch origin git checkout -b master --track origin master   origin master is clone s default   Then you can reset the tree to get the commit you want   git reset origin master   or whatever commit you think is proper      and you are like you cloned   The interesting question here  and the one without answer   How to find out which commit your naked tree was based on  hence to which position to reset to

User · Answer

if you are cloning the same repository  then run the following snippet through the existing repository git pull origin master

User · Answer

Usually I will clone the initial repository first  and then move everything in the existing folder to the initial repository  It works every time    The advantage of this method is that you won t missing anything of the initial repository including README or  gitignore   You can also use the command below to finish the steps     git clone https   github com your repo git  amp  amp  mv existing folder   your repo

User · Answer

git init git remote add origin git github com  lt user gt   lt repo gt  git git remote -v git pull origin master

User · Answer

Just use the   at the end of the git clone command  being in that directory   like this   cd your dir to clone in  git clone git github com somerepo

User · Answer

You can do it by typing the following command lines recursively    mkdir temp dir       Create new temporary dicetory named temp dir git clone https   www           git temp dir    Clone your git repo inside it mv temp dir   existing dir    Move the recently cloned repo content from the temp dir to your existing dir rm -rf temp dir    Remove the created temporary directory

User · Answer

This can be done by cloning to a new directory  then moving the  git directory into your existing directory   If your existing directory is named  code    git clone https   myrepo com git git temp mv temp  git code  git rm -rf temp   This can also be done without doing a checkout during the clone command  more information can be found here

User · Answer

This is the Best of all methods i came across  Clone just the repository s  git folder  excluding files as they are already in existing-dir  into an empty temporary directory   git clone --no-checkout repo-path-to-clone existing-dir existing-dir tmp   might want --no-hardlinks for cloning local repo   Move the  git folder to the directory with the files  This makes existing-dir a git repo    mv existing-dir existing-dir tmp  git existing-dir    Delete the temporary directory   rmdir existing-dir existing-dir tmp cd existing-dir   Git thinks all files are deleted  this reverts the state of the repo to HEAD   WARNING  any local changes to the files will be lost    git reset --mixed HEAD

User · Answer

There are two approaches to this  Where possible I would start with a clean folder for your new git working directory and then copy your version of things in later  This might look something like    mv  dir  dir orig git clone  url  dir rsync -av --delete --exclude   git   dir orig   dir  rm -rf  dir orig   At this point you should have a pretty clean working copy with your previous working folder as the current working directory so any changes include file deletions will show up on the radar if you run git status   On the other hand if you really must do it the other way around  you can get the same result with something like this   cd  dir git clone --no-checkout  url tempdir mv tempdir  git   rmdir tempdir git reset --mixed HEAD   Either way  the first thing I would do is run something like git stash to get a copy of all your local changes set aside  then you can re-apply them and work through which ones you want to get committed     Both examples assume you start out on the shell in the parent directory of your project

User · Answer

To clone a git repo into an empty existing directory do the following   cd myfolder git clone https   myrepo com git git      Notice the   at the end of your git clone command  That will download the repo into the current working directory

User · Answer

If you are using at least git 1 7 7  which taught clone the --config option   to turn the current directory into a working copy   git clone example com my git    git --mirror --config core bare false   This works by    Cloning the repository into a new  git folder --mirror makes the new clone into a purely metadata folder as  git needs to be --config core bare false countermands the implicit bare true of the --mirror option  thereby allowing the repository to have an associated working directory and act like a normal clone     This obviously won t work if a  git metadata directory already exists in the directory you wish to turn into a working copy

User · Answer

Lots of answers already to do it the way that the OP asked  But it worth noting that doing it the opposite way around is far simpler   git clone repo-url tmp  cp -R working  tmp    You now have the desired target state - fresh clone   local-changes

User · Answer

git clone your repo tmp  amp  amp  mv tmp  git    amp  amp  rm -rf tmp  amp  amp  git reset --mixed

User · Answer

I d git clone to a new directory and copy the content of the existing directory to the new clone

User · Answer

Using a temp directory is fine  but this will work if you want to avoid that step  From the root of your working directory     rm -fr  git   git init   git remote add origin your-git-url   git fetch   git reset --mixed origin master

User · Answer

The following i did  to checkout master branch in an existing directory   git init git remote add origin  my-repo  git fetch git checkout origin master -ft

[git] What's the best practice to "git clone" into an existing folder?

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