Normal structure

But he didn’t want to push the .git dir as well. He wanted something like this:

Required structure

If you look at the git-clone man page, there’s this option called --separate-git-dir which lets you assign a custom directory as the .git dir. The syntax is:

git clone git://path.to.repo newdir --separate-git-dir=somedir

But in this case, my colleague didn’t want to clone again. He had local branches galore and all. So I tried out the git-clone mentioned above and checked what really happens. It turns out that git creates a file called .git inside the working tree that looks like this:

gitdir: /home/thameera/path/to/git/dir

Gotcha! Now what we need to do is move my friend’s .git directory to a separate location and create a file called .git that has the path to the git dir as above. It works!