I am following this tutorial. Everything works fine until I run this on my local machine (after replacing the $VARIABLEs with their actual values):

git remote add nfsn ssh://$USERNAME@$SERVER/home/private/git/$REPONAME.git

I receive the following error message:

fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

How do I get past this step?

Did you init a local Git repository, into which this remote is supposed to be added?

Does your local directory have a .git folder?

Try git init.