git checkout branch from outside

Question

Problem: I need somehow to checkout an existing branch of a project that is already cloned locally on my file system without being in that particular folder of this project.

Answer 1

You can use --git-dir to specify the .git directory to use as the repository, and --work-tree to specify the working tree to to the checkout in. See the git man page for details.

git --git-dir=file-system-folder/.git --work-tree=file-system-folder checkout existing-branch