I have an already initialized Git repository that I added a .gitignore
file to. How can I refresh the file index so the files I want ignored get ignored?
This question is related to
git
caching
version-control
gitignore
git-rm
None of the answers worked for me.
Instead:
After moving the file back, git will ignore it.
Works with directories too!
Remove trailing whitespace in .gitignore
Also, make sure you have no trailing whitespace in your .gitignore. I got to this question because I was searching for an answer, then I had a funny feeling I should open the editor instead of just cat'ing .gitignore. Removed a single extra space from the end and poof it works now :)
If you need to stop tracking a lot of ignored files, you can combine some commands:
git ls-files -i --exclude-standard | xargs -L1 git rm --cached
This would stop tracking the ignored files. If you want to actually remove files from filesystem, do not use the --cached
option. You can also specify a folder to limit the search, such as:
git ls-files -i --exclude-standard -- ${FOLDER} | xargs -L1 git rm
I have found a weird problem with .gitignore. Everything was in place and seemed correct. The only reason why my .gitignore was "ignored" was, that the line-ending was in Mac-Format (\r). So after saving the file with the correct line-ending (in vi using :set ff=unix) everything worked like a charm!
another problem I had was I placed an inline comment.
tmp/* # ignore my tmp folder (this doesn't work)
this works
# ignore my tmp folder
tmp/
Not knowing quite what the 'answer' command did, I ran it, much to my dismay. It recursively removes every file from your git repo.
Stackoverflow to the rescue... How to revert a "git rm -r ."?
git reset HEAD
Did the trick, since I had uncommitted local files that I didn't want to overwrite.
One other problem not mentioned here is if you've created your .gitignore in Windows notepad it can look like gibberish on other platforms as I found out. The key is to make sure you the encoding is set to ANSI in notepad, (or make the file on linux as I did).
From my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11451916/406592
Thanks to your answer, I was able to write this little one-liner to improve it. I ran it on my .gitignore and repo, and had no issues, but if anybody sees any glaring problems, please comment. This should git rm -r --cached
from .gitignore
:
cat $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.gitIgnore | sed "s/\/$//" | grep -v "^#" | xargs -L 1 -I {} find $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel) -name "{}" | xargs -L 1 git rm -r --cached
Note that you'll get a lot of fatal: pathspec '<pathspec>' did not match any files
. That's just for the files which haven't been modified.
There is another suggestion maybe for the slow guys like me =) Put the .gitignore file into your repository root not in .git folder. Cheers!
To untrack a file that has already been added/initialized to your repository, ie stop tracking the file but not delete it from your system use: git rm --cached filename
If you are trying to ignore changes to a file that's already tracked in the repository (e.g. a dev.properties file that you would need to change for your local environment but you would never want to check in these changes) than what you want to do is:
git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>
If you wanna start tracking changes again
git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>
See git-update-index(1) Manual Page.
Also have a look at the skip-worktree
and no-skip-worktree
options for update-index if you need this to persist past a git-reset (via)
Update: Since people have been asking, here's a convenient (and updated since commented on below) alias for seeing which files are currently "ignored" (--assume-unchanged) in your local workspace
$ git config --global alias.ignored = !git ls-files -v | grep "^[[:lower:]]"
To remove just a few specific files from being tracked:
git update-index --assume-unchanged path/to/file
If ever you want to start tracking it again:
git update-index --no-assume-unchanged path/to/file
On my server linux server (not true on my local dev mac), directories are ignored as long as I don't add an asterisk:
www/archives/*
I don't know why but it made me loose a couple of hours, so I wanted to share...
As dav_i says, in order to keep the file in repo and yet removing it from changes without creating an extra commit you can use:
git update-index --assume-unchanged filename
i followed these steps
git rm -r --cached .
git add .
git reset HEAD
after that, git delete all files (*.swp in my case) that should be ignoring.
If the files are already in version control you need to remove them manually.
One thing to also keep in mind if .gitignore
does not seem to be ignoring untracked files is that you should not have comments on the same line as the ignores. So this is okay
# ignore all foo.txt, foo.markdown, foo.dat, etc.
foo*
But this will not work:
foo* # ignore all foo.txt, foo.markdown, foo.dat, etc.
.gitignore
interprets the latter case as "ignore files named "foo* # ignore all foo.txt, foo.markdown, foo.dat, etc."
, which, of course, you don't have.
Yes - .gitignore
system only ignores files not currently under version control from git.
I.e. if you've already added a file called test.txt
using git-add
, then adding test.txt
to .gitignore
will still cause changes to test.txt
to be tracked.
You would have to git rm test.txt
first and commit that change. Only then will changes to test.txt
be ignored.
If you want to stop tracking file without deleting the file from your local system, which I prefer for ignoring config/database.yml
file. Simply try:
git rm --cached config/database.yml
# this will delete your file from git history but not from your local system.
now, add this file to .gitignore
file and commit the changes. And from now on, any changes made to config/database.yml will not get tracked by git.
$ echo config/database.yml >> .gitignore
Thanks
Complex answers everywhere!
Just use the following
git rm -r --cached .
It will remove the files you are trying to ignore from the origin and not from the master on your computer!
After that just commit and push!
Source: Stackoverflow.com