Opening a GIT repository (or whatever this is that I have!)

[IdBuRnS]

A client sent us a ZIP of their Git repository. Basically it's a ZIP that had a TAR inside. Extracting that TAR gives me a bunch of folders with .git at the end of the folder name. Each subfolder from there contains folders with "branches", "hooks", "info", "objects" and "refs". There are also loose files, "config", "description" and "HEAD".

I'm trying to open these up in a desktop Git client but it's saying that these aren't "git repositories". How, or what, do I need to open these folders so all the versioning history and files can be browsed through?

Computer OS is Windows 7. I have no idea what the original environment was.

Thanks!

 

[sweenish]

Put everything in a root folder, open that root folder as a repository.

 

[IdBuRnS]

I currently have it all in a root folder. When I point Git to that folder it says it's not a repository.

 

[Elixer]

Assuming you made Blah directory, and in that directory, there is a .git directory & possibly other files, then it should work.

Download https://git-scm.com/download/win install that, say yes to shell integration, and when that installs, open explorer to that directory, right click inside that directory, and select 'git gui here' and if it is valid, it should work.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

So, from OP it sounds like you have "folder1.git" "folder2.git" and so on.

Each of those folders should be renamed ".git" and moved to its own directory.

/folder2/.git
/folder1/.git

Then cd /folder1/ and "git status" should return something.

If it doesn't, they screwed something up. Tell them to copy the repos to a thumb drive and mail it. Or upload it to Github or something if it's not proprietary.

 

[IdBuRnS]

Thanks for all the replies!

After some playing around I was able to load each .git folder individually. I'm guessing because they each contain the "config", "description" and "HEAD" files.

It seems that the parent directory, that has all of these .git subdirectories in it, should also have it's own set of "config", description" and "Head" files which would tell the repository software that all of those subfolders are really part of a larger repository.

Does that make sense?

 

[Elixer]

If you have multiple directories, then it sounds like they are submodules?
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules