“git add” returning “fatal: outside repository” error

Question

I\'m just entering into the wonderful world of git. I have to submit a bunch of changes that I\'ve made on my program, located in a directory called /var/www/myapp

Answer 1

Okay, this error came up for me because I moved the project from one computer to another.
So the git was not able to figure my global git user.name and user.email

I opened the command prompt and specified my old git user.name and user.email from previous computer. Kindly run the following commands and it should be fixed.

cd pathToMyProjectDirectory
git config user.name "myName" 
git config user.email "myEmail" 

Answer 2

My scenario is that the git repository's path has symbolic link and git throw out this error when add file say to "/home/abc/GIT_REPO/my_dir/my_file". and "/home" is actually a softlink to "/devhome".

code ninja gave me some light when I tried to debug this case.

So I tried get the target directory by using the command readlink -f /home/abc/GIT_REPO before run add command.

And then everything works like a charm !

Answer 3

Maybe someone comes along having the same trouble like I had: In my case this error was thrown while using husky (commit hooks) https://github.com/typicode/husky

It was just an error because of encodings. My source was located in a directory that contains a special character ("ö")

Seems like husky uses "git add" with the absolute path of the source which fails somehow at this point

I renamed the path and it worked fine.

Answer 4

This message can also appear when the file name is listed in the .gitignore file.