How to Add an Existing Folder on Your Computer to a New Git Repo

This is a simple and quick tutorial on how to add an existing folder (and files) on your computer to a new git repo.

1- Create your project online (like Bitbucket or GitHub)

2- Then cd into the folder where your files are and initialize it

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/victor/Sync/BitTorrentSync/victor/www/.git/

3- Add all your files to be tracked (if you have anything that you want to exclude, you might want to do that with .gitignore now)

$ git add *

4- Commit with a initial message

$ git commit -m "My initial commit"
[master (root-commit) 652fc1a] My initial commit
 1942 files changed, 41072 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Arri/ARRICAM Checklist Project/ARRICAM ST CHECKLIST.doc
 create mode 100644 Arri/ARRICAM Checklist Project/k4.44256.0.jpg
 create mode 100644 Arri/ARRICAM Checklist Project/k5.42387.0.jpg
 create mode 100644 Arri/ARRICAM Checklist Project/k5.42388.0.jpg
...
 create mode 100644 wazem.org/sub.sites/Koken/photo.spheres
 create mode 100644 wazem.org/sub.sites/Koken_Installer.zip
 create mode 100644 wazem.org/sub.sites/Koken_Installer/koken/index.php

5- Add the remote location (example below is for Bitbucket)

$ git remote add origin git@bitbucket.org:[user]/[my-repo].git

6- Push the files

$ git push -u origin master
Counting objects: 2054, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2035/2035), done.
Writing objects:   1% (41/2054), 4.41 MiB | 844.00 KiB/s

You should see the following when it’s done

Total 2054 (delta 219), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@bitbucket.org:[user]/[my-repo].git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
Branch master set up to track remote branch master from origin.