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

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.