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 is the Best of all methods i came across

Clone just the repository's .git folder (excluding files as they are already in existing-dir) into an empty temporary directory

1. git clone --no-checkout repo-path-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.

2. mv existing-dir/existing-dir.tmp/.git existing-dir/

Delete the temporary directory

3. rmdir existing-dir/existing-dir.tmp

4. 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.

5. git reset --mixed HEAD