GIT clone repo across local file system in windows

Question

You can specify the remote’s URL by applying the UNC path to the file protocol. This requires you to use four slashes:

git clone file:////<host>/<share>/<path>

For example, if your main machine has the IP 192.168.10.51 and the computer name main, and it has a share named code which itself is a git repository, then both of the following commands should work equally:

git clone file:////main/code
git clone file:////192.168.10.51/code

If the Git repository is in a subdirectory, simply append the path:

git clone file:////main/code/project-repository
git clone file:////192.168.10.51/code/project-repository

$ git clone --no-hardlinks /path/to/repo

The above command uses POSIX path notation for the directory with your git repository. For Windows it is (directory C:/path/to/repo contains .git directory):

C:\some\dir\> git clone --local file:///C:/path/to/repo my_project

The repository will be clone to C:\some\dir\my_project. If you omit file:/// part then --local option is implied.

the answer with the host name didn't work for me but this did :

git clone file:////home/git/repositories/MyProject.git/

I was successful in doing this using file://, but with one additional slash to denote an absolute path.

git clone file:///cygdrive/c/path/to/repository/

In my case I'm using Git on Cygwin for Windows, which you can see because of the /cygdrive/c part in my paths. With some tweaking to the path it should work with any git installation.

Adding a remote works the same way

git remote add remotename file:///cygdrive/c/path/to/repository/

Maybe map the share as a network drive and then do

git clone Z:\

Mostly just a guess; I always do this stuff using ssh. Following that suggstion of course will mean that you'll need to have that drive mapped every time you push/pull to/from the laptop. I'm not sure how you rig up ssh to work under windows but if you're going to be doing this a lot it might be worth investigating.

Not sure if it was because of my git version (1.7.2) or what, but the approaches listed above using machine name and IP options were not working for me. An additional detail that may/may not be important is that the repo was a bare repo that I had initialized and pushed to from a different machine.

I was trying to clone project1 as advised above with commands like:

$ git clone file:////<IP_ADDRESS>/home/user/git/project1
Cloning into project1...
fatal: '//<IP_ADDRESS>/home/user/git/project1' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

and

$ git clone file:////<MACHINE_NAME>/home/user/git/project1
Cloning into project1...
fatal: '//<MACHINE_NAME>/home/user/git/project1' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

What did work for me was something simpler:

$ git clone ../git/project1
Cloning into project1...
done.

Note - even though the repo being cloned from was bare, this did produce a 'normal' clone with all the actual code/image/resource files that I was hoping for (as opposed to the internals of the git repo).

Either enter absolute paths or relative paths.

For example the first one below uses absolute paths :

(this is from inside the folder which contains the repository and the backup as subfolders. also remember that the backup folder is not modified if it already contains anything. and if it is not present, a new folder will be created )

~/git$ git clone --no-hardlinks ~/git/git_test1/   ~/git/bkp_repos/

The following uses relative paths :

~/git$ git clone --no-hardlinks git_test1/   bkp_repos2/