I did an earlier post where I did this, but I felt like it was sloppy. Also, I did not add files to be ignored. So, here is how to add an existing Eclipse project to Git:
Step 1: In a terminal, change directories to your Eclipse workspace and project (assuming it is called my-project)
cd ~/workspace/my-project
Step 2: intialize the repository
git init
Step 3: add any files you want to ignore — consider any test data that might contain real production data and also consider connection information
vi .git/info/exclude
Assuming you have an Apache Derby database called db, you would exclude all of the database and the log with the following two lines:
db derby.log
If you want to exclude Eclipse specific files, you may choose to add the following two lines:
.classpath .project
Step 4: Add your files to your new Git repository
git add .
Step 5: Commit your files to the repository
git commit -m "My-Project inital code"
Step 6: Tag your code with a version
git tag v1.0
Update: You may want to tag this way so other developers see your tag (thanks Dominic):
git tag -a -m "GIT v1.0" v1.0
Now, your git repository is created and contains the code from your Eclipse project.
You probably want to say
git tag -a otherwise other developers may not see your tag…Thanks for the help Dominic. I have updated the post.