How to convert a normal Git repository to a bare one?

Question

How can I convert a \'normal\' Git repository to a bare one?

The main difference seems to be:

• in the normal Git repository, you have a .git

Answer 1

Here is the definition of a bare repository from gitglossary:

A bare repository is normally an appropriately named directory with a .git suffix that does not have a locally checked-out copy of any of the files under revision control. That is, all of the Git administrative and control files that would normally be present in the hidden .git sub-directory are directly present in the repository.git directory instead, and no other files are present and checked out. Usually publishers of public repositories make bare repositories available.

I arrived here because I was playing around with a "local repository" and wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted as if it were a remote repository. I was just playing around, trying to learn about git. I'll assume that this is the situation for whoever wants to read this answer.

I would love for an expert opinion or some specific counter-examples, however it seems that (after rummaging through some git source code that I found) simply going to the file .git/config and setting the core attribute bare to true, git will let you do whatever you want to do to the repository remotely. I.e. the following lines should exist in .git/config:

[core]
    ...
    bare = true
...

(This is roughly what the command git config --bool core.bare true will do, which is probably recommended to deal with more complicated situations)

My justification for this claim is that, in the git source code, there seems to be two different ways of testing if a repo is bare or not. One is by checking a global variable is_bare_repository_cfg. This is set during some setup phase of execution, and reflects the value found in the .git/config file. The other is a function is_bare_repository(). Here is the definition of this function:

int is_bare_repository(void)
{
    /* if core.bare is not 'false', let's see if there is a work tree */
    return is_bare_repository_cfg && !get_git_work_tree();
} 

I've not the time nor expertise to say this with absolute confidence, but as far as I could tell if you have the bare attribute set to true in .git/config, this should always return 1. The rest of the function probably is for the following situation:

1. core.bare is undefined (i.e. neither true nor false)
2. There is no worktree (i.e. the .git subdirectory is the main directory)

I'll experiment with it when I can later, but this would seem to indicate that setting core.bare = true is equivalent to removeing core.bare from the config file and setting up the directories properly.

At any rate, setting core.bare = true certainly will let you push to it, but I'm not sure if the presence of project files will cause some other operations to go awry. It's interesting and I suppose instructive to push to the repository and see what happened locally (i.e. run git status and make sense of the results).