What's the best practice to git clone into existing directory?

Question

I have a working copy of the project, without any source control metadata. Now, I'd like to do the equivalent of git-clone into this folder and keep my local changes.

git-clone doesn't allow me to clone into an existing folder. What is the best practice here?

Answer 1

Don't clone, fetch instead. In the repo:

git init

git remote add origin $url_of_clone_source

git fetch origin

git checkout -b master --track origin/master # origin/master is clone's default branch

Then you can reset the tree to get back to the commit you mention in the git reset command:

git reset origin/master # or to whatever commit you want to go reset to

and you are like you cloned.

The interesting question here (and the one without the answer): How to find out which commit your naked tree was based on, hence to which position to reset to.