In a Git repository, how to properly rename a directory?

1. Change a folder's name from oldfolder to newfolder

git mv oldfolder newfolder

2. If newfolder is already in your repository & you'd like to override it and use:- force

git mv -f oldfolder newfolder

Don't forget to add the changes to index & commit them after renaming with git mv.

3. Renaming foldername to folderName on case insensitive file systems

Simple renaming with a normal mv command(not git mv) won’t get recognized as a filechange from git. If you try it with the ‘git mv’ command like in the following line

git mv foldername folderName

If you’re using a case insensitive filesystem, e.g. you’re on a Mac and you didn’t configure it to be case sensitive, you’ll experience an error message like this one:

fatal: renaming ‘foldername’ failed: Invalid argument

And here is what you can do in order to make it work:-

git mv foldername tempname && git mv tempname folderName

This splits up the renaming process by renaming the folder at first to a completely different foldername. After renaming it to the different foldername the folder can finally be renamed to the new folderName. After those ‘git mv’s, again, do not forget to add and commit the changes. Though this is probably not a beautiful technique, it works perfectly fine. The filesystem will still not recognize a change of the letter cases, but git does due to renaming it to a new foldername, and that’s all we wanted :)

Basic rename (or move):

git mv <old name> <new name>

Case sensitive rename—eg. from casesensitive to CaseSensitive—you must use a two step:

git mv casesensitive tmp
git mv tmp CaseSensitive

(More about case sensitivity in Git…)

…followed by commit and push would be the simplest way to rename a directory in a git repo.

If you receive this error: fatal: renaming ‘foldername’ failed: Invalid argument

Try this:

*nixOS

git mv foldername tempname && git mv tempname folderName

WinOS

git config core.ignorecase false; git mv foldername tempname; git mv tempname folderName