Git pull into existing project without git folder

Question

This seems like it should be a common issue, but perhaps I'm not searching for the correct terminology.

I just copied an old project on a remote server to my local machine using scp . I created a new instance of a git repository using git init and used git remote add origin ... to create a new remote git repository on-line, which I pushed to. This is the projects first instance of being tracked by git.

I created a .gitignore file so not all the content was pushed to the remote repository and I also pushed some minor changes after the initial commit.

Now I wish to pull the repository to the original project on the remote server. It obviously has no .git folder. I want the changes to be pulled but keep the files listed in the .gitignore, so I can't simply wipe the directory and perform a clean git clone .

I only have ssh access. How do I go about this?

Answer 1

Ok figured out a method that worked for me using ssh.

Copy the local projects .git folder to the project on the remote servers directory. You may have to copy to a folder with correct privileges then move the .git folder

scp /local/path/to/.git user@remote:/remote/path/to/temp/folder

Change the ownership of the .git and move it to the existing projects directory

chown -R www-data:www-data .git/
mv .git/ /var/www/....

Performing a git status shows the changed files and untracked files. In my case the 'changed' files were the old files I wanted to overwrite, and the untracked files where the files I specified in .gitignore.

So to 'revert' the files to the new versions in the branch (stored in the .git folder) and ignore the untracked files, I just did

git checkout .

This also added the .gitignore file, which I had to chown too.

This was tested on a project with only a master branch, but I hope this helps people in the future. My terminology may be a little off describing the git processes but hopefully everyone gets the picture.