gitignore is ignored by Git

Question

My  gitignore file seems to be being ignored by Git - could the  gitignore file be corrupt  Which file format  locale or culture does Git expect   My  gitignore     This is a comment debug log nbproject    Output from git status     On branch master   Your branch is ahead of  origin master  by 1 commit      Untracked files       use  git add  lt file gt      to include in what will be committed            debug log         nbproject  nothing added to commit but untracked files present  use  git add  to track    I would like debug log and nbproject  not to appear in the untracked files list   Where should I start looking to fix this

User · Answer

There s another issue with  gitignore that might happen  especially for a Windows user  Git does not like it when you name  gitignore  such as unity gitignore    You ll want to always name it  gitignore  or on Windows   gitignore  as Windows thinks you are trying to rename it without a filename

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OK  so in my case the accepted solution did not work  and what worked is described here   Is Visual Studio 2013 ignoring your  gitignore file   In short    Close Visual Studio  Navigate to your  git folder Delete ms-persist xml Restart Visual Studio

User · Answer

One thing to also look at  Are you saving your  gitignore file with the correct line endings   Windows   If you re using it on Windows  are you saving it with Windows line endings  Not all programs will do this by default  Notepad   and many PHP editors default to Linux line endings so the files will be server compatible  One easy way to check this  is open the file in Windows Notepad  If everything appears on one line  then the file was saved with Linux line endings   Linux   If you are having trouble with the file working in a Linux environment  open the file in an editor such as Emacs or nano  If you see any non-printable characters  then the file was saved with Windows line endings

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Fixed  OK  I created the  gitignore file in Notepad on Windows and it wasn t working  When I viewed the  gitignore file on Linux it looked like organised gibberish - perhaps Notepad had written out Unicode rather than ASCII or whatever 8-bit is   So I rewrote the file on my Linux box  and when I pulled it back into Windows it works fine  Hurrah

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Another cause of this issue is blank spaces or tabs before the statement   Example     Be aware of the following   notWorkingIgnore   workingIgnore     And as pointed out by the comment below a trailing space can be an issue as well     Be aware of the following  notWorkingIgnore     lt -Space workingIgnore    lt -Nospace

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Also check out the directory where you put  gitignore   It should be in the root of your project     myproject  gitignore   Not in    myproject  git  gitignore

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As with the other solutions  commit first and be aware that you will lose any un-committed changes   I had better results with this   git rm -r --cached   git reset HEAD --hard git status   Note that the status shouldn t have any modified files now

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PhpStorm  and probably some other IDE users   in my case problem was that I created and added file outside the project  through the finder   I deleted that one  and recreated the same one but in PhpStorm project  with right-click -  New -  File   and it worked right away

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My problem was that I wrote down files to ignore with quotes     separation not with slash     This did not work and was ignored by git      db sqlite3   tdd venv     This worked just fine     db sqlite3  tdd venv    I also checked my file encoding in windows with Notepad    Encoding was set to UTF-8

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I ve created  gitignore using echo        gt   gitignore in PowerShell in Windows  because it does not let me to create it in Windows nbsp Explorer   The problem in my case was the encoding of the created file  and the problem was solved after I changed it to ANSI

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One tricky thing not covered by the other answers here is that the  gitignore file won t work if you have inline comments  like this   foo bar   The bar file contains sensitive data so we don t want to make this public   So  if you do have comments like that  change them like this     The bar file contains sensitive data so we don t want to make this public foo bar

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Without adding another commit to your project  one line will be enough to make  gitignore work as it is supposed to   git rm -r --cached debug log nbproject   This will remove them from the repository  but still keep them physically  In plain English  it deletes any history of changes related to them  and also will not track their change in any future commit  You may find a better explanation here

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My 30 cent trick    Pl clean your directory  git clean -f  I tried git rm -r --cached   but it did not work for me     Warning  git clean -f will remove untracked files  meaning they re gone for good since they aren t stored in the repository  Make sure you really want to remove all untracked files before doing this   May be you can try git clean -xdf which removes ignored dirs and untracked files   Now bring HEAD to the current position git reset HEAD --hard   check git status   Now create  gitignore which in my cases wanted to ignore a folder called data  So I wrote  data   initial   is for file folder  later   is for folder only   Now do git add  commit  and push

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I just ran into this issue  The content within my  gitignore file continued to appear in the list of untracked files   I was using this to create the ignore file   echo  node modules   gt   gitignore   It turns out that the double quotations were causing the issue for me  I deleted the ignore file and then used the command again without quotes  and it worked as expected  I did not need to mess with the file encoding  I m on a Windows nbsp 10 machine using Cmder   Example   echo node modules  gt   gitignore

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In my case  it s because the files already exist in the repository and I m trying to ignore it   These are the things I did to fix the issue    Copy the files to a temporary folder Remove them from my project folder  Commit the changes which remove those files from the repository Re-added those files to my project folder   By then  any changes I made on those files were ignored   I think you can t ignore files that already exist on the repository

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I had this same problem  I believe the issue was a CR vs  CR LF discrepancy  I stashed things in my  gitignore using CMD  on Windows nbsp 7  and the following command   Bad   echo  file to be ignored py   gt  gt   gitignore lt br gt  echo       gt  gt   gitignore   Etc   The issue was that this command does not place the correct end-of-line marker for Git to recognize the newlines  either CR or CR LF when Git expects the other   I solved the problem by manually replacing each newline in Vim  Vim to the rescue   and it worked perfectly   Try editing your  gitignore in Notepad   or Vim  ideally   Even if the file looks like it s formatted correctly  try replacing the newlines  It sounds weird  I know  but it worked for me   D

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This might sound silly  but what solved my problem was realizing that  gitignore is working correctly  even if it says deleted  yourfile on git status   I was going to ignore an error log file  to ignore any errors I caused  but save the ones caused by other developers in case they came in handy one day while debugging an odd problem  However  git does not let you  ignore  and also keep a file at the same time    I wanted it to be  frozen in time   but git says it either gets tracked  or it is not allowed to be there at all

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Just remove the folder or file  which was committed previously in Git  by the following command  Then gitignore file will reflect the correct files       git rm -r -f  folder or files insides

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There s some great answers already  but my situation was tedious  I d edited source of an installed PLM  product lifecycle management  software on Win10 and afterward decided   I probably should have made this a git repo    So  the cache option won t work for me  directly  Posting for others who may have added source control AFTER doing a bunch of initial work AND  gitignore isn t working BUT  you might be scared to lose a bunch of work so git rm --cached isn t for you    IMPORTANT  This is really because I added git too late to a  project  that is too big and seems to ignore my  gitignore  I ve NO commits  ever  I can git away with this     First  I just did   rm -rf  git rm -rf  gitignore   Then  I had to have a picture of my changes  Again  this is an install product that I ve done changes on  Too late for a first commit of pure master branch  So  I needed a list of what I changed since I d installed the program by adding  gt  changed log to either of the following   PowerShell    Get files modified since date  Get-ChildItem -Path path to installed software  -Recurse -File   Where-Object -FilterScript      LastWriteTime -gt  2020-02-25      Select-Object FullName   Bash    Get files modified in the last 10 days    find    -type f -mtime -10   Now  I have my list of what I changed in the last ten days  let s not get into best practices here other than to say  yes  I did this to myself    For a fresh start  now   git init     Create and edit  gitignore   I had to compare my changed list to my growing  gitignore  running git status as I improved it  but my edits in  gitignore are read-in as I go   Finally  I ve the list of desired changes  In my case it s boilerplate - some theme work along with sever xml configs specific to running a dev system against this software that I want to put in a repo for other devs to grab and contribute on    This will be our master branch  so committing  pushing  and  finally BRANCHING for new work

User · Answer

Specifically for Windows users  If you have untracked files and clearing removing the cached files is not working  Try opening PowerShell and converting the  gitignore file to UTF-8 encoding    Myfile   Get-Content    gitignore   Myfile   Out-File -Encoding  UTF8   gitignore   You need to only do this once to encode the  gitignore file for that directory  and since the file is then encoded correctly  whenever you edit the file in the future it should work  I believe this is due to a glitch with GitHub not being about to read non UTF-8 encoding for a  gitignore file  As far as I m aware this issue has not yet been resolved for Windows  It s not too big of a deal  just a pain to debug when it s not working

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For me none of the previous answers worked  I had to copy  gitignore text into the exclude txt file found at    lt Your-project-folder gt   git info   Once done  refresh your changes and all the untracked files are gone  Commit as usual

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I had this problem  with a  gitignore file containing this line   lib ext    I just realized that in fact  this directory is a symbolic link to a folder somewhere else   ls -la lib ext  lrwxr-xr-x 1 roipoussiere users 47 Feb  6 14 16 lib ext - gt   home roipoussiere real path to the lib   On the line lib ext   Git actually looks for a folder  but a symbolic link is a file  so my lib folder is not ignored   I fixed this by replacing lib ext  by lib ext in my  gitignore file

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It is also a possibility that you edited the  gitignore file with a sudo command  I encountered the same issue and while executing the commands  git status  I could still see the  should be ignored  files   Upon editing with nano  gitignore instead of sudo nano  gitignore  I could see the correct reflection

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Even if you haven t tracked the files so far  Git seems to be able to  quot know quot  about them even after you add them to  gitignore  WARNING  First commit or stash your current changes  or you will lose them  Then run the following commands from the top folder of your Git repository  git rm -r --cached   git add   git commit -m  quot fixed untracked files quot

User · Answer

Mine wasn t working because I ve literaly created a text document called  gitignore  Instead  create a text document  open it in Notepad   then save as  gitignore  Make sure to pick All types       from the dropdown when you save it     Or in gitbash  simply use touch  gitignore

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All the answers here are actually workarounds  You need to create the  gitignore file before you run git init  Otherwise git will never know you need to ignore those files  because they have been tracked already   echo  idea   gt  gt   gitignore git init   If you develop on a daily basis  I advise you to add your habitual ignored files to your    gitignore global file  That way  git will already know which files you  meaning  your user   since it s a file in your home directory  usually ignore

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My issue was  as OP suggested  a corrupt  gitignore file  I didn t believe that it was and ignored the possibility until everything else failed  The corruption didn t show up in vi  but there were two bytes on the start of the file that caused the  gitignore file to be ignored  For me  these only showed up when I typed cat  gitignore  which showed       Built application files   apk   ap           I have no idea how these ended up there  but recreating the file fixed the issue  A hex analysis of the corrupt file showed the following   user dev   project myproject   xxd -b  gitignore 00000000  11111111 11111110 00100011 00000000 00100000 00000000         00000006  01000010 00000000 01110101 00000000 01101001 00000000  B u i

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Another possible reason     a few instances of Git clients running at the same time  For example   git shell     GitHub Desktop   etc     This happened to me  I was using  GitHub Desktop  as the main client  and it was ignoring some new  gitignore settings  commit after commit    You commit something  Next  commit  it ignores  gitignore settings  Commit includes lots of temporary files mentioned in the  gitignore  Clear Git cache  check whether  gitignore is UTF-8  remove files  rarr  commit  rarr  move files back  skip one commit     nothing helped    Reason  the Visual Studio Code editor was running in the background with the same opened repository  Visual Studio Code has built-in Git control  and this makes for some conflicts   Solution  double-check multiple  hidden Git clients and use only one Git client at a time  especially while clearing the Git cache

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If you are a Notepad   user  try doing the following   Open your  gitignore file using Notepad   and do   Menu Edit  rarr  EOL Conversion  rarr  Windows Format  rarr  Save   Try using git status again and see if it works for you   I have posted the answer to a similar question here

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For me it was yet another problem  My  gitignore file is set up to ignore everything except stuff that I tell it to not ignore  Like such        content    Now this obviously means that I m also telling Git to ignore the  gitignore file itself  Which was not a problem as long as I was not tracking the  gitignore file  But at some point I committed the  gitignore file itself  This then led to the  gitignore file being properly ignored   So adding one more line fixed it        content    gitignore

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If it seems like Git isn t noticing the changes you made to your  gitignore file  you might want to check the following points    There might be a global  gitignore file that might interfere with your local one When you add something into a  gitignore file  try this   git add  uncommitted changes you want to keep   amp  amp  git commit git rm -r --cached   git add   git commit -m  fixed untracked files   If you remove something from a  gitignore file  and the above steps maybe don t work if you found the above steps are not working  try this   git add -f  files you want to track again  git commit -m  Refresh removing files from  gitignore file       For example  if you want the  java type file to be tracked again     The command should be         git add -f   java

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I noticed that the encoding of the  gitignore was having an effect--if the file was Unicode  it was ignored  if it was ASCII  it wasn t   Process    Verify status  PS gt  git status Create a function to Get-FileEncoding Test  gitignore s encoding  PS gt  Get-FileEncoding  gitignore Change the encoding to ASCII  PS gt  Set-Content  gitignore -Encoding Ascii -Value  Get-Content  gitignore  Confirm  PS gt  git status

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I too have the same issue on Ubuntu  I created the  gitignore from the terminal and it works for me  touch  gitignore

[git] .gitignore is ignored by Git

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