Does the .git local repository have to be contained in the local working directory?

Question

Specifically I'm using Eclipse and egit:

• using the wizard to share a project with egit, it moved the working directory out of the eclipse workspace into the folder I had chosen to hold git depositories
• the .git repository was contained in this folder

My questions are:

• I read that the git repository should not be in the Eclipse workspace but why can't the working directory be in the Eclipse workspace?
• Is it because the local repository have to be contained inside the git working directory?

I've found a few questions about moving the directory back, but I don't want to do that without knowing why it was moved in the first place (I don't want to create problems for later).

Answer 1

No, the .git directory does not have to be in your working directory. You can point a Git repository at another directory as its working directory using the --work-tree option:

--work-tree=<path>

Set the path to the working tree. It can be an absolute path or a path relative to the current working directory. This can also be controlled by setting the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable and the core.worktree configuration variable (see core.worktree in git-config(1) for a more detailed discussion).

Consider the following example:

$ # Create a Git repository
$ mkdir project
$ cd project
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /path/to/project/.git/
$ ls -a
. .. .git

$ # Now, start working in another directory
$ cd ..
$ mkdir working-directory
$ cd working-directory
$ echo foo > foo.txt

$ # And now, commit to the initially created repository
$ cd ../project
$ git --work-tree=../working-directory status
$ git --work-tree=../working-directory add foo.txt
$ git --work-tree=../working-directory commi

It is very likely that Eclipse is using this option internally.