git clone through ssh

Question

I have a project on which I created a git repository:

$ cd myproject  
$ git init  
$ git add .  
$ git commit  

I the wanted to create a bare clone on another machine:

$ cd ..  
$ git clone --bare myproject  ssh://user@server:/GitRepos/myproject.git  

I executed the clone but did not print any answer. I logged on to the server machine and tried to see how the files are stored. The path /GitRepos was empty, so I decided to do the clone again:

$ git clone --bare myproject  ssh://user@server:/GitRepos/myproject.git

This time the answer was :

fatal: destination path 'ssh://user@server:/GitRepos/myproject.git' already exists and is not an empty directory.

But I saw that the path was empty.
What's going on here ?

Answer 1

This is possibly unrelated directly to the question; but one mistake I just made myself, and I see in the OP, is the URL specification ssh://user@server:/GitRepos/myproject.git - namely, you have both a colon :, and a forward slash / after it signifying an absolute path.

I then found Git clone, ssh: Could not resolve hostname – git , development – Nicolas Kuttler (as that was the error I was getting, on git version 1.7.9.5), noting:

The problem with the command I used initially was that I tried to use an scp-like syntax.

... which was also my problem! So basically in git with ssh, you either use

• ssh://username@host.xz/absolute/path/to/repo.git/ - just a forward slash for absolute path on server
• username@host.xz:relative/path/to/repo.git/ - just a colon (it mustn't have the ssh:// for relative path on server (relative to home dir of username on server machine)

Hope this helps someone,
Cheers!