Git – How to convert existing non-empty directory into a Git working directory and push files to a remote repository

git

I have a non-empty directory (eg /etc/something) with files that cannot be renamed, moved, or deleted.
I want to check this directory into git in place.
I want to be able to push the state of this repository to a remote repository (on another machine) using "git push" or something similar.

This is trivial using Subversion (currently we do it using Subversion) using:

svn mkdir <url> -m <msg>
cd <localdir>
svn co <url> .
svn add <files etc>
svn commit -m <msg>

What is the git equivalent?

Can I "git clone" into an empty directory and simply move the .git directory and have everything work?

Best Answer

Given you've set up a git daemon on <url> and an empty repository:

cd <localdir>
git init
git add .
git commit -m 'message'
git remote add origin <url>
git push -u origin master

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis
git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] <path>…
Description

Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.

Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.

If any optional <path>... arguments are given, only those paths are affected.

Step 1 is to show what will be deleted by using the -n option:

# Print out the list of files and directories which will be removed (dry run)
git clean -n -d

Clean Step - beware: this will delete files:

# Delete the files from the repository
git clean -f

To remove directories, run git clean -f -d or git clean -fd
To remove ignored files, run git clean -f -X or git clean -fX
To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run git clean -f -x or git clean -fx

Note the case difference on the X for the two latter commands.

If clean.requireForce is set to "true" (the default) in your configuration, one needs to specify -f otherwise nothing will actually happen.

Again see the git-clean docs for more information.

Options

-f, --force

If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to run unless given -f, -n or -i.

-x

Don’t use the standard ignore rules read from .gitignore (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, but do still use the ignore rules given with -e options. This allows removing all untracked files, including build products. This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git reset) to create a pristine working directory to test a clean build.

-X

Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.

-n, --dry-run

Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.

-d

Remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files. If an untracked directory is managed by a different Git repository, it is not removed by default. Use -f option twice if you really want to remove such a directory.

Git – How to add a blank directory to a Git repository

Another way to make a directory stay (almost) empty (in the repository) is to create a .gitignore file inside that directory that contains these four lines:

# Ignore everything in this directory
*
# Except this file
!.gitignore

Then you don't have to get the order right the way that you have to do in m104's solution.

This also gives the benefit that files in that directory won't show up as "untracked" when you do a git status.

Making @GreenAsJade's comment persistent:

I think it's worth noting that this solution does precisely what the question asked for, but is not perhaps what many people looking at this question will have been looking for. This solution guarantees that the directory remains empty. It says "I truly never want files checked in here". As opposed to "I don't have any files to check in here, yet, but I need the directory here, files may be coming later".

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis

Description

Options

Git – How to add a blank directory to a Git repository

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