Hello developers,

Did you encounter once that you want to work with local git repository only? Without hosting your code in any online service such as Github? I wanted to do it today and found it isn’t well-documented so I will guide you through my experience.

First locate the folder that will contain your working directory. In my current example, it will be /users/zaatar/developer.

1. Open terminal and go to the destination directory: cd /users/zaatar/developer
2. Create a new folder that will be your git working directory: mkdir HelloWorld
3. Go into this directory cd HelloWorld
4. Initialize your local git repository: git init --bare
5. Add the local remote to your repository so you can checkout and push from it: git remote add origin /users/zaatar/developer/HelloWorld
6. Create your own new master branch: git checkout -b master

That’s it! now you can now push and pull from it.

Now, you can work with your repository as it has a remote server. But it actually doesn’t have a remote one. The server of this repository is a local one hosted in the folder.

Tips:

• Note, doing this command git init --bare without --bare option will create a repository with a remote server. So, you have to define it later
• If you have already a repository and want to change the server from being remote to a local one? or if you want to change your current git local server, use: git remote set-url origin NEW_FOLDER
• If you want to know where is the server folder is located: git remote -v

Hope that could help you!