"Reinitialized existing Git repository" message in completely new directory

Question

When running the git init command in a completely new and empty directory, I get this error message:

Reinitialized existing Git repository in /<just path stuff>/gittests/completelyEmptyDirectory/.git/

What is going on here? The only commands being run are mkdir completelyEmptyDirectory, going into that directory, and then running git init.

Answer 1

After investigating further the reason this was happening is because in my .gitconfig the [init] section was pointing to my .git_templates folder. The templates folder contains only one file called HEAD that had this:

ref: refs/heads/main

Not sure exactly why this was causing the error above.

Replacing that line with:

defaultBranch = main

resolved the issue. Still would like to figure out why the [init] was set to point to the .git_templates in the first place.

Answer 2

That is not an error message but the message produced by git init when it is executed into an existing repository. You probably executed git init twice in that directory and this is the message produced on the second run.

The documentation of git init explains:

Running git init in an existing repository is safe. It will not overwrite things that are already there.