fatal: not a git repository

Sometimes, you'd see the error as:

fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories)

The solution here is to verify that you're running the git command in a directory that belongs to a git repository. Either the .git directory exists in the current directory where you're running the command or it exists in the parent directory.

It's even possible that you haven't yet created a repository. Maybe you forgot to run a git init? Or maybe you deleted the existing .git directory? Or maybe you have manually modified the .git directory? That could potentially "confuse" git or make the repository invalid.

Look around--the .git directory is the piece of the puzzle for solving this error.

All Git's commands (well, most) run in the context of a repository:

• status shows the state of a repository
• log shows the commit history of a repository
• commit captures a snapshot of changes in a project and saves the snapshot to a repository
• and so on

These commands have something to do with "a repository". So if there's no repository, and you run git status, then git is like "uhmmm, show you the state of what please?".

git log will also result in "hello there, the commit history of what please?".

A command like git help will run without a repository though, because that command is not related to "a repository".

Every git repository lives in a .git directory. When you create a new repository (or clone a repository) for a project, you have the project on your device, and in that project, you have the .git directory. This is where git saves all the information necessary for you to navigate the repository. Things like the branches you have, commit history, remote connections and much more.

Say you're in a directory like /my/fancy/project/. Then you run git status for example. How would git know what repository you're referring to?

Firstly, git looks for /my/fancy/project/.git/, that is, the .git directory in the current directory you're on before running the command.

If git doesn't see the .git directory here, then it would look for the directory in /my/fancy/.git/. That is, it tries to look for the closest .git directory which might be in the parent directory. If the parent directory has a git repository, that means the current directory (the child directory) is also part of that repository.

If the parent directory does not have the .git directory in it, then git checks for /my/.git/. If there's nothing like that, git checks for /.git/.

Still nothing? Then all hope lost. git concludes that the current directory is not part of a git repository. And since that context doesn't exist, git says:

fatal: not a git repository