Why doesn t Git ignore my specified file

Question

I added the following line to  gitignore   sites default settings php   but when I type git status it shows the file as unstaged file   What s the problem  All other patterns work well

User · Answer

I run into this  it s an old question  but I want that file to be tracked but to not track it on certain working copies  to do that you can run  git update-index --assume-unchanged sites default settings php

User · Answer

I tried most commands above on VS Code terminal and I got errors like   fatal  pathspec   dir   file   did not match any files  I opened the project on GitHub Desktop and ignored from there and it worked

User · Answer

One thing that I think has been missed in the excellent answers here is the existence if another   gitignore  or multiple of them  In a case  I had cloned a repo and could not figure out why a  quot ignored quot  file was being added again when running git add  It worked out that there was another  gitignore in a subfolder and that was overriding the one in the root folder    gitignore  some-folder  gitignore  some-folder this-file-keeps-getting-staged  The  root   gitignore  was ignoring this-file-keeps-getting-staged The   some-folder  gitignore  did not have a specification to ignore  quot this-file-keeps-getting-staged quot  file  And hence the issue  One of the things is to simply search for multiple  gitignore files in the hierarchy  And figure out the rules as they apply

User · Answer

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 temp files mentioned in the  gitignore  Clear git cache  check whether  gitignore is UTF8  remove files -  commit -  move files back  skip 1 commit     nothing helped    Reason  the Visual Studio Code editor was running in the background with the same opened repository  VS Code has built-in git control  and this makes some conflicts   Solution  double-check multiple  hidden git clients and use only one git client at once  especially while clearing git cache

User · Answer

Make sure the  gitignore does not have a extension    It can t be  gitignore txt   in windows just name the file  gitignore  and it will work

User · Answer

There are instances e g  Application Configuration files  which I want tracked in git  so  gitignore will not work   but that I need to change for local settings  I do not want git to manage these files or show them as modified  To do this I use skip-worktree   git update-index --skip-worktree path to file   You can confirm files are skipped by listing files and checking for lines starting with S for skipped  git ls-files -v   grep  S   If in the future you want to have git manage the file locally again simply run    git update-index --no-skip-worktree path to file   Mescalito above had a great answer  that led me down the right track but  git update-index --assume-unchanged file to ignore php  Has a contract with git that in which   the user promises not to change the file and allows Git to assume that the working tree file matches what is recorded in the index   However  I change the content of the files  so in my case --skip-worktree is the better option   Toshiharu Nishina s website provided an excellent explanation of skip-worktree vs assume-unchanged  Ignore files already managed with Git locally

User · Answer

Please use this command  git rm -rf --cached   git add     Sometimes  gitignore files don t work even though they re correct  The reason Git ignores files is that they are not added to the repository  If you added a file that you want to ignore before  it will be tracked by Git  and any skipping matching rules will be skipped  Git does this because the file is already part of the repository

User · Answer

I just tried this with git 1 7 3 1  and given a structure like   repo  git  repo  gitignore repo sites default settings php   where repo thus is the  root  mentioned above  I would call it the root of your working tree   and  gitignore contains only sites default settings php  the ignore works for me  and it does not matter whether  gitignore is added to the repo or not   Does this match your repo layout  If not  what differs

User · Answer

Make sure that your  gitignore is in the root of the working directory  and in that directory run git status and copy the path to the file from the status output and paste it into the  gitignore   If that doesn   t work  then it   s likely that your file is already tracked by Git  You can confirm this through the output of git status  If the file is not listed in the    Untracked files    section  then it is already tracked by Git and it will ignore the rule from the  gitignore file   The reason to ignore files in Git is so that they won t be added to the repository  If you previously added a file you want to be ignored  then it will be tracked by Git and the ignore rules matching it will be skipped  Git does this since the file is already part of the repository   In order to actually ignore the file  you have to untrack it and remove it from the repository  You can do that by using git rm --cached sites default settings php  This removes the file from the repository without physically deleting the file  that   s what the --cached does   After committing that change  the file will be removed from the repository  and ignoring it should work properly

User · Answer

What I did it to ignore the settings php file successfully    git rm --cached sites default settings php commit   up to here didn t work  manually deleted sites default settings php  this did the trick  git add   commit   ignored successfully    I think if there s the committed file on Git then ignore doesn t work as expected  Just delete the file and commit  Afterwards it ll ignore

User · Answer

I had the same problem  Files defined in  gitingore where listed as untracked files when running git status   The reason was that the  gitignore file was saved in UTF-16LE encoding  and not in UTF8 encoding   After changing the encoding of the  gitignore file to UTF8 it worked for me

User · Answer

gitignore will only ignore files that you haven t already added to your repository   If you did a git add    and the file got added to the index   gitignore won t help you   You ll need to do git rm sites default settings php to remove it  and then it will be ignored

User · Answer

Just in case anyone in the future has the same problem that I did   If you use the                 trick to remove binary files with no extension  make sure that ALL other gitignore lines are BELOW  Git will read from  gitignore from the top  so even though I had  test go  in my gitignore  it was first in the file  and became  unignored  after

[git] Why doesn't Git ignore my specified file?

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