How do I clone into a non-empty directory

Question

I have directory A with files matching directory B  Directory A may have other needed files  Directory B is a git repo   I want to clone directory B to directory A but git-clone won t allow me to since the directory is non-empty   I was hoping it would just clone  git and since all the files match I could go from there   I can t clone into an empty directory because I have files in directory A that are not in directory B and I want to keep them   Copying  git is not an option since I want refs to push pull with and I don t want to set them up manually   Is there any way to do this   Update  I think this works  can anyone see any problems  --   cd a git clone --no-hardlinks --no-checkout    b a tmp  mv a tmp  git   rm -rf a tmp git unstage   apparently git thinks all the files are deleted if you don t do this

User · Answer

A slight modification to one of the answers that worked for me   git init git remote add origin PATH TO REPO git pull origin master   to start working on the master branch straight away

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I had a similar problem with a new Apache web directory  account created with WHM  that I planned to use as a staging web server  I needed to initially clone my new project with the code base there and periodically deploy changes by pulling from repository   The problem was that the account already contained web server files like    bash history  bash logout  bash profile  bashrc  contactemail  cpanel           that I did not want to either delete or commit to my repository  I needed them to just stay there unstaged and untracked   What I did   I went to my web folder  existing folder    cd  home existing folder   and then   git init git remote add origin PATH TO REPO git pull origin master git status   It displayed  as expected  a list of many not staged files - those that already existed initially from my cPanel web account   Then  thanks to this article  I just added the list of those files to      git info exclude     This file  almost like the  gitignore file  allows you to ignore files from being staged  After this I had nothing to commit in the  git  directory - it works like a personal  gitignore that no one else can see   Now checking git status returns   On branch master nothing to commit  working tree clean   Now I can deploy changes to this web server by simply pulling from my git repository  Hope this helps some web developers to easily create a staging server

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I liked Dale s answer  and I also added  git clone --depth 2 --no-checkout repo-to-clone existing-dir existing-dir tmp git branch dev new214 git checkout dev new214 git add   git commit git checkout dev git merge dev new214   The shallow depth avoided a lot of extra early dev commits  The new branch gave us a good visual history that there was some new code from this server that was placed in  That is the perfect use branches in my opinion  My thanks to the great insight of all the people who posted here

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Another simple recipe seems to work well for me   git clone --bare  URL  git git config core bare false   My main use case for checking out to a directory with existing files is to control my Unix dotfiles with Git   On a new account  the home directory will already have some files in it  possibly even the ones I want to get from Git

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Here s what I ended up doing when I had the same problem  at least I think it s the same problem   I went into directory A and ran git init   Since I didn t want the files in directory A to be followed by git  I edited  gitignore and added the existing files to it  After this I ran git remote add origin   lt url gt    amp  amp  git pull origin master et vo  la  B is  cloned  into A without a single hiccup

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I got the same issues when trying to clone to c code  But this folder contains a whole bunch of projects   I created a new folder in c code newproject and mapped my clone to this folder   git for desktop then asked of my user and then cloned fine

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Here is what I m doing   git clone repo  tmp folder cp -rf  tmp folder  git  dest folder  cd  dest folder git checkout -f master

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I have used this a few moments ago  requires the least potentially destructive commands   cd existing-dir git clone --bare repo-to-clone  git git config --unset core bare git remote rm origin git remote add origin repo-to-clone git reset   And voil

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This worked for me   git init git remote add origin PATH TO REPO git fetch git reset origin master    Required when the versioned files existed in path before  git init  of this repo  git checkout -t origin master   NOTE  -t will set the upstream branch for you  if that is what you want  and it usually is

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The following worked for me  First I d make sure the files in the a directory are source-controlled    cd a   git init   git add     git commit -m  quot     quot   Then   git remote add origin https   URL TO REPO   git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories   git push origin master

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In the following shell commands existing-dir is a directory whose contents match the tracked files in the repo-to-clone git repository     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-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 --hard HEAD

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Warning - this could potentially overwrite files   git init      git remote add origin PATH TO REPO      git fetch      git checkout -t origin master -f   Modified from  cmcginty s answer - without the -f it didn t work for me

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this is work for me  but you should merge remote repository files to the local files       git init git remote add origin url-to-git git branch --set-upstream-to origin master master git fetch git status

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I was looking for something similar  and here s what I came up with   My situation is one where I have an active web tree and I was trying to create a remote repository for it without moving any of the files in the current web tree   Here s what I did    Go to the web tree and run git init Go to the intended location of the repository and run  git clone --bare  path to web repo Edit the config file in my remote repo and remove the  remote  origin   section  Add a  remote  origin   section to  git config in the web tree pointing to the new remote repo

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This worked for me   cd existing folder git init git remote add origin path to your repo git git add   git commit git push -u origin master

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Maybe I misunderstood your question  but wouldn t it be simpler if you copy move the files from A to the git repo B and add the needed ones with git add   UPDATE  From the git doc      Cloning into an existing directory is only allowed if the directory is empty    SOURCE  http   git-scm com docs git-clone

[git] How do I clone into a non-empty directory?

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