Receiving fatal Not a git repository when attempting to remote add a Git repo

Question

I am introducing myself to Git by following this tutorial   getting jekyll running on nearlyfreespeech net  Everything works fine up until the part where the repo is added to my local machine  git remote add nfsn ssh   USERNAME NFSNSERVER home private git REPONAME git   After replacing USERNAME  NFSNSERVER  and REPONAME with the correct names  I receive the following error  fatal  Not a git repository  or any of the parent directories    git  Can you help me get past this step

User · Answer

In my case I used Tortoise SVN and made the mistake to also use the Visual Studio GIT functions at the same time. That made Visual Studio lock the HEAD file inside the .git folder so neither VS or Tortoise could access the repo and i got the "fatal: Not a git repo..." error from both applications.

Solution:

Go inside the .git folder and rename "HEAD.lock" to just "HEAD"
Decide for one GIT admin application and don't touch the other one

User · Answer

In my case a system crash had caused the HEAD file to become corrupted  This guide shows how to fix that and other problems you may encounter   https   git seveas net repairing-and-recovering-broken-git-repositories html

User · Answer

hit git init using terminal cmd in your desired folder  It ll do the job

User · Answer

Did you init a local Git repository  into which this remote is supposed to be added   Does your local directory have a  git folder   Try git init

User · Answer

If you are seeing this error in your self-hosted GitHub actions logs then it might be you are not using the latest git version supported by Github actions  For knowing which version it is supported  go to actions checkout logs and upgrade your server git version to the mentioned version or above this

User · Answer

Go to your source folder where local repo is stored   example mine is found in c  GitSource   right click while in the folder   click git bash here   then git status

User · Answer

When you see this trying to push to github you may have to initialize this repo at github first  https   github com new

User · Answer

This may also be due to permissions   Check the owner   group permissions and make sure you have adequate permissions to access that data   In my case  I came across this error when running  git status  in a repo whose ownership was set to root root   Running  git status  as root solved my issue   Alternatively  if you don t want the user group ownership to be root root  chown the repo to something you have access to

User · Answer

Below error seems like Gits didn t find  git file in current directory so throwing error message    Therefore change to directory to repository directory where you have checkout the code from git and then run this command      git checkout

User · Answer

GIT DIR should be unset  unset GIT DIR

User · Answer

In case it helps somebody else  I got this error message after accidentally deleting  git objects      fatal  Not a git repository  or any of the parent directories    git   Restoring it solved the problem

User · Answer

Probably too late but Another solution that might help future visitors  First delete the old  git directory -  rm  git   Then initialize the git repo again  git init

User · Answer

You ll get this error if you try to use a Git command when your current working directory is not within a Git repository  That is because  by default  Git will look for a  git repository directory  inside of the project root    as pointed out by my answer to  Git won t show log unless I am in the project directory       According to the official Linux Kernel Git documentation    GIT DIR is  an environment variable  set to look for a  git directory  in the current   working directory   by default            If the GIT DIR environment variable is set then it specifies a path to use instead of the default  git for the base of the     repository       You ll either need to cd into the repository working copy  or you didn t initialize or clone a repository in the first place  in which case you need to initialize a repo in the directory where you want to place the repo   git init   or clone a repository  git clone  lt remote-url gt  cd  lt repository gt

User · Answer

restore the  git ORIG HEAD and other root  git repo files  I got this error after restoring from backup  apparently the files contained in the  git directory root didn t make it to the target but all the subfolders did so at first I thought the repo was intact   I fixed it by restoring the root files

User · Answer

It seems like you are not going to your specific folder  For example  if I am working on a project  named bugsBunny and it is saved in the folder d  work code   so first you have to go to that folder using cd d  work code bugsBunny   then after that you can continue using your git commands

User · Answer

git status fatal  Not a git repository    Just type the following in your cmd or git shell or any other terminal     git init

User · Answer

I had this issue with the Jenkins Git plugin after authentication issues with GitLab  Jenkins was reporting  hudson plugins git GitException      stderr  GitLab  The project you were looking for could not be found  fatal  Could not read from remote repository    However if I did a  git clone  or  git fetch  direct from the Jenkins box  command line  it worked without issue   The issue was resolved by deleting the entire  workspace directory in the Jenkins jobs folder for that particular job  e g   rm -Rf  JENKINS HOME jobs myJenkinsJob workspace    Presumably the local  git folder had got stale corrupted

User · Answer

This issue occurred to me after I moved the location of a git project on the filesystem  When I ran some git commands the error occurred  e g      git status fatal  Not a git repository   home rospasta path old gitprojecta  git modules  travis   I found in  home rospasta path old gitprojecta  travis  git the absolute path of the old location of the project was written  Manually updating this path of the new location resolved the problem for me   So my issue may or may not be a git problem  but HTH

User · Answer

In command line CLI  you will get this error if your current directory is NOT the repository  So  you have to first CD into the repo

User · Answer

I had this issue and fixed it by adding README md file

User · Answer

I reached this question because encountered the error message fatal  not a git repository     repos abc   and because I was afraid there was some incompatibilities between git versions  fortunately not   none of the answers I read here was the solution for my case and I find some of this answers dangerous and misleading  I got the error because I moved a repository from OpenBSD to Linux  but that could happen just by changing the shell  in OpenBSD I was using  in  kshrc with ksh  to invoke git  note the form    in the paths   alias git-abc  git --git-dir   repos abc --work-tree   Development abc   in OpenBSD with ksh it works with that syntax to define aliases  while in linux with bash the   inside such exact same alias definition quoted doesn t expand when the alias is invoked  I solved by removed the quotes in the alias definition  alias git-abc git --git-dir   repos abc --work-tree   Development abc

User · Answer

My problem was that for some hiccups with my OS any command on my local repository ended with  fatal  Not a git repository  or any of the parent directories    git   with fsck command included   The problem was empty HEAD file   I was able to find actual branch name I ve worked on in  git refs heads and then I did this   echo  ref  refs heads ML  94 FILTER TYPES AND SPECIAL CHARS   gt   git HEAD   It worked

User · Answer

git was working fine for be and all of sudden it started showing this fatal  Not a git repository  or any of the parent directories    git message    For me not sure what was corrupted in  git folder  I did git clone    newfolder and copied the entire  git folder to my corrupted old folder where I was making changes before git started showing error message     Everything got back to normal and git also recognized my changed un-staged files

User · Answer

in my case  i had the same problem while i try any git -- commands  eg git status  using windows cmd  so what i do is after installing git for window https   windows github com  in the environmental variables  add the class path of the git on the  PATH  varaiable  usually the git will installed on C  user  username  appdata local git bin add this on the PATH in the environmental variable  and one more thing on the cmd go to your git repository or cd to where your clone are on your window usually they will be stored on the documents under github cd Document Github yourproject after that you can have any git commands  thank you

User · Answer

For that you need to enter one command that is missing from bitbucket commands  Please try git init

User · Answer

In my case I found that git in windows became case sensitive for the drive letter from some point   After upgrading git binary in windows cli commands that used to work stopped  for example the path in the script was D  bla file txt while git command accepted only d  bla file txt

User · Answer

For me  this was related to malformed ownership in my  git  path   root owned  git HEAD and  git index  preventing the jenkins user from running the job

User · Answer

In my case the file  git HEAD was corrupted  contained only dots   So I edited it and replaced its content with    ref  refs heads master  and it started working again

User · Answer

Happened to me when my client Smartgit put a newline in my  git HEAD file   Deleting the empty line fixed it

User · Answer

NOTE  this does not answer to the common problem  which was OP   s problem  but to different problem where this error message may come up  I didn   t feel like doing new question just to write this answer down  tell me if I should do that instead  P  I got to situation  most likely due to some corruption of certain crash I had  that I got this error even when  git did exist   smar aaeru   P Nominatim gt  git status fatal  Not a git repository  or any of the parent directories    git smar aaeru   P Nominatim  128  gt  ls  git COMMIT EDITMSG  config   FETCH HEAD  HEAD  index  logs   modules   objects   ORIG HEAD packed-refs   Since I didn   t have anything that really needed preserving  I just went with dummy way  and did     smar aaeru   P Nominatim  128  gt  git init Reinitialized existing Git repository in  home smar Projektit Nominatim  git    Still not working though  as for example git log returns fatal  bad default revision  HEAD   Remotes were there though  so I did git fetch --all and then just git reset --hard origin master to get myself to the state the repo was previously   Note that if there is some uncommitted changes  you can see them with git status  git diff and so on  Then just git diff yourfile  gt  patch before running the reset   At least for me reflog  git reflog  disappeared completely  Hence  if you do the reset  and there was some changes you wanted to prevent  I   m not sure you can get them back after reset anymore  So  make sure that you have all changes you can   t lose backed up  ultimately by just copying the clone before trying this

User · Answer

Even i had the same problem  i wrote a shell script which will backup all my codes to my git repo on working days of a week at 17 55 by using crontab  by seeing the logs of cron i found the above mentioned problem   the above problem comes only when you are trying to execute git commands from a non-gir dir ie from other dir which is not the working copy   to fix this add -C  lt git dir gt  in the git command you are executing such that git status will be git -C  dir to git status and git add -A will be git -C  dir to git -A

[git] Receiving "fatal: Not a git repository" when attempting to remote add a Git repo

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