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#Git

This error means you ran a git command somewhere git does not recognise as a repository. Usually you are in the wrong directory, or the repo was never initialised.

Published by Mark van Eijk on June 23, 2026 · 1 minute read

About the error

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

Git commands operate on a repository, identified by a .git directory. When you run a git command, git looks in the current directory and walks up through the parents searching for .git. If it never finds one, you get this error.

Why do I see this error

You're in the wrong directory, outside the project, or one level above it.
The directory was never initialised as a git repository.
The .git directory was deleted (sometimes accidentally, sometimes by an over-broad clean).
You cloned into a subdirectory and are running git from the parent.

Solution

Check where you are

First confirm your location and whether a .git directory exists here:

pwd
ls -la       # look for a .git entry

If you don't see .git, you're either in the wrong place or this isn't a repo. cd into the actual project directory:

cd ~/Sites/my-project
git status

Initialise a new repository

If this directory should be a repository but never was, create one:

git init

Clone instead, if the project lives on a remote

If the code already exists on GitHub and you just don't have it locally, clone it rather than init:

git clone git@github.com:you/my-project.git
cd my-project

Find the repository root from a subdirectory

If you're somewhere inside a repo but a parent got confused, this prints the top level (or errors if you're truly outside one):

git rev-parse --show-toplevel

If you recently saw refusing to merge unrelated histories and then this, a deleted or recreated .git directory is a likely common cause.