Clone into a non-empty Git directory

Current Location：Home > Learning > OPERATING SYSTEM > Git >

Git Docker

Clone into a non-empty Git directory

Author：JIYIK Last Updated：2025/03/29 Views：

This article will show you how to clone a Git repository to a non-empty folder. This operation comes in handy when you want to merge files from a remote repository with files in your current local repository.

In Git, clone into a non-empty Git directory

It is easy to clone a remote repository. We use the following command.

git clone <repository-url> <directory>

This will clone the remote repository into the specified directory. However, the directory should be empty.

If you try to clone in a non-empty repository, you will get 致命警告a message like the one below.

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git (main)
$ git clone https://github.com/Wachira11ke/Delftscopetech.git
fatal: destination path 'Delftscopetech' already exists and is not an empty directory.

Since the directory Delftscopetechalready exists and contains some files, we cannot use git clonethe command to clone our repository.

If you don't need the files in the directory you can delete them, but if you want to merge the files in two repositories use the method below.

example:

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git (main)
$ cd \Delftscopetech1

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git/Delftscopetech1 (main)
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in C:/Users/pc/Git/Delftscopetech1/.git/

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git/Delftscopetech1 (master)
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/Wachira11ke/Delftscopetech.git

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git/Delftscopetech1 (master)
$ git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories
fatal: couldn't find remote ref master

pc@JOHN MINGW64 ~/Git/Delftscopetech1 (master)
$ git pull origin main --allow-unrelated-histories
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 610 bytes | 3.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/Wachira11ke/Delftscopetech
 * branch            main       -> FETCH_HEAD
 * [new branch]      main       -> origin/main

We have successfully cloned our remote repository into our local repository with a non-empty directory.

Previous：Clone all branches in Git

Next：Fatal: Refusing to Merge Unrelated Histories error in Git

For reprinting, please send an email to 1244347461@qq.com for approval. After obtaining the author's consent, kindly include the source as a link.

Article URL：

JIYIK CN >