I’m trying to connect a local workspace to an identical repository on GitHub. In this instance, I cannot use git clone so I’m trying to find a work-around. I seem to be able to set the remote url fine, but normal git commands don’t work as expected for me afterwards.

To start, I ran the following commands:

git init
git remote set-url origin [my SSH clone path]

Those commands run fine and without error. When I run git remote -v it returns the expected repo path for fetch/push and git branch -a returns the expected list of remote branches.
But if I run git checkout -B main it doesn’t seem to do anything. I would expect it to checkout main and create a local branch for it, but git branch returns nothing. If I try doing git pull origin main it says all of my local files will be overwritten (when they match the incoming pull completely). If I run git branch main, instead of creating a new branch, I get fatal: not a valid object name: 'main'. I’ve never had any issues using the commands mentioned with more traditionally cloned repos. Any insight or suggestions would be appreciated.