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.

Answer 1

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.