Silence is Foo Mental notes on Ruby, Git, Rails and whatever geeky thing

Ignoring files in Git

I've realized that there is a general misunderstandig about ignoring files in Git. People often try to ignore changes to tracked files adding them to a .gitignore file, but you should know that Git will ignore files in .gitignore only of the files are not already tracked ("tracked" means that the file is in the repository), but what happen if one add a tracked file to .gitignore? well, nothing happens, Git won't ignore the file and it will continue showing it when one execute git-status. In this post I'll show you how to ignore tracked and untracked files.

1.The gitignore way (to ignore untracked files)

*Create a .gitignore file (the name doesn't matters at all, you can name it whatever name you want)

$vim .git/config #project-specific configuration file
$vim ~/.gitconfig #system-wide configuration file (if it doesn't exist, create it)

and look for this -> [core], if it doesn't exists, then add it like this:

 [core]     excludesfile = "the_path_of_your_gitignore_file/.gitignore" 

2.The assume-unchanged way (to ignore changes in tracked files)

 $git update-index --assume-unchanged my_file.rb 
After issuing this command you won't see the changes madde to my_file.rb in git-status. You have to be carefull, because if you issue $git add my_file.rb, Git will add the file to the index.
That's it!