How do I pull/fetch with Git *INTO* a bare repository?

Question

I'm writing a tool to backup all my repositories from Bitbucket (which supports Git and Mercurial) to my local machine.

It already works for Mercurial, where I do it like this:

• create a new empty repository without a working copy on the local machine
  (the same like a bare Git repository)
• pull from the remote repository into the local empty repository

Now I'm trying to do the same with Git.

I already found out that I can't directly pull to a bare repository and that I should use fetch instead.

So I tried it:

C:\test>git fetch https://github.com/SamSaffron/dapper-dot-net.git
remote: Counting objects: 1255, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1178/1178), done.
remote: Total 1255 (delta 593), reused 717 (delta 56)
Receiving objects: 100% (1255/1255), 13.66 MiB | 706 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (593/593), done.
From https://github.com/SamSaffron/dapper-dot-net
 * branch            HEAD       -> FETCH_HEAD

Obviously Git did fetch something, but the local repository is empty after that.
(git log says fatal: bad default revision 'HEAD')

What am I doing wrong?

Disclaimer:
I have only very, very basic Git knowledge (I usually use Mercurial).
And I'm using Windows, if that matters.

Answer 1

Try

git fetch https://github.com/SamSaffron/dapper-dot-net.git master:master

Answer 2

To backup the remote repository into your bare repository regulary configure first

git config remote.origin.url https://github.com/SamSaffron/dapper-dot-net.git
git config remote.origin.fetch "+*:*"

and then simply run

git fetch --prune

to backup.

• You probably can skip the fist configuration addition as this should has been already set while cloning the remote repository.
• Please also mind the enclosing double quotation marks (") in the above command to protect the asterix (*) not to be interpreted from your shell.
• The plus sign is needed to allow non-fastforward updates. That is probably your intention if you want to backup the current state of your remote.
• Option --prune is used to also delete by now non-existent branches.

Answer 3

I think you if you really want to backup. You can try $ git clone --mirror XXXX command. it will get almost everything from repository. Hope it is helpful.

Answer 4

$ git fetch https://github.com/SamSaffron/dapper-dot-net.git +refs/heads/*:refs/heads/* --prune