Ignore files that have already been committed to a Git repository

Question

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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  gt  gt   gitignore   Thanks

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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   lt pathspec gt   did not match any files   That s just for the files which haven t been modified

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

If the files are already in version control you need to remove them manually

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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  lt file gt    If you wanna start tracking changes again  git update-index --no-assume-unchanged  lt file gt    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

User · Answer

There is another suggestion maybe for the slow guys like me    Put the  gitignore file into your repository root not in  git folder  Cheers

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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  quot git rm -r   quot    git reset HEAD   Did the trick  since I had uncommitted local files that I didn t want to overwrite

User · Answer

None of the answers worked for me    Instead    Move the file out of the git-controlled directory Check the removal into git Move the file back into the git-controlled directory    After moving the file back  git will ignore it    Works with directories too

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

To untrack a single file that has already been added initialized to your repository  i e   stop tracking the file but not delete it from your system use  git rm --cached filename  To untrack every file that is now in your  gitignore   First commit any outstanding code changes  and then  run this command    git rm -r --cached     This removes any changed files from the index staging area   then just run    git add     Commit it    git commit -m   gitignore is now working      To undo git rm --cached filename  use git add filename      Make sure to commit all your important changes before running git add      Otherwise  you will lose any changes to other files

User · Answer

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

[git] Ignore files that have already been committed to a Git repository

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