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.
.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.
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?
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.
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
What I did it to ignore the settings.php file 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.
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.
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:
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.
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
!*.*
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
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 "ignored" 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 "this-file-keeps-getting-staged" 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.
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.
Source: Stackoverflow.com