I used to develop on linux environment, but now I need to write a git project on "windows" os. I need to ignore a directory from where the git is initiated.
like folder/.git/, now I need to ignore /folder/project/bin/*. So I have added .gitignore file on folder/.gitignore using both text pad and Visual studio.
.gitignore file contents are
/project/bin/*
Now, I expect git status should not show /project/bin folder.
Note, I have tried other ways too, but it seems that git is considering the .gitignore file as a general text file or so.
Just a guess, but I suspect that the leading forward-slash is throwing something off. I'm not sure about the trailing star either (as I reference my own .gitignore files).
Your .gitignore should be this:
project/bin/
I frustratingly found the same issue. I couldn't seem to ignore folders, but files were OK. My issue started with folders that contain spaces. All the combinations I could find after a searching (full directory path, trying to ignore case, escaping the spaces, etc) didn't resolve it.
I had to remove spaces in directory names, then I was able to ignore files.
I tried it on WSL (Windows sub-system for Linux - git was already installed), no problems.
Then reading more, I realised that if files are previously tracked, then the .gitignore won't work. I tested it by deleting all the files in the directory, then adding the directory to .gitignore path/to/my_files/*.csv (in my case I'm ignoring data in .csv files) and doing a commit then push (good job this is just dev).
After that worked, I was able to use git rm -r --cached ./path/to/my_files/ to un track all the files in another directory rather than cutting and pasting them back (Thanks to this answer)
So:
Un-track all the files
Add the directory in .gitignore (In windows it wasn't case sensitive)
add/commit/push as normal.
Related
We are forced to work on Windows at work, and I have lets say problem, strange situation. We have github repository, inside which we have one directory with name Something (with capitalized first letter 'S'), but in my local I see this directory with name something (note lower case 's'), git status shows that working directory is clean, even if I change this directory locally to, for example SoMeThInG git says that nothing changed. I suspect that Windows is here a problem, as it is case insensitive. Is there possibility to change this directory name from Windows level? Or maybe how to force git bash to be case sensitive?
Update
I've changed that files from mine virtual fedora, but this is just a workaround, the question remains unanswered, how to do it properly on Windows?
On case-insensitive file systems, Git will not detect changes just in casing. However, when committing files, the actual casing is still being reflected in the way it was added to the index.
So a git add file and git add FILE will both work for a file that is named file in any kind of casing (e.g. FiLe or fIlE), but each command will actually stage that exact name into the repository. So git add file will make the name be case-sensitive file and git add FILE will make the name case-sensitive FILE.
That’s why you should try to always use your command line auto completion for file names, so you don’t accidentally add files with a different casing than they actually are. Or use commands that stage the files automatically, e.g. git add ., since that will also use the actual casing.
However, since Git will not detect casing changes, once a file has been added with a particular casing, that casing will be used until you explicitly change it. That’s why it’s possible to have files in a folder src/readme.md and SRC/license.txt that are both physically in the same location on your file system, but are represented using incompatible paths inside of Git. So you should be careful here.
That all being said, you can fix the casing later. But to do that, you need to make the change using Git instead of the file system, as Git is case sensitive while the file system isn’t. So commands like git mv will work. Same as a combination of git rm --cached and git add.
For example, to fix the above situation of the src/SRC directory, one could do (assuming the correct name of the folder should be Src):
git mv src/readme.md Src/readme.md
# or
git rm --cached SRC/license.txt
git add Src/license.txt
You can also fix the casing for every file by removing everything from the index, and then adding it back:
git rm --cached -r .
git add .
That should stage all renames to the correct file casing.
This question already has answers here:
Ignore files that have already been committed to a Git repository [duplicate]
(21 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I'm trying to create a Github repository for a friend's project (a video game), but can't get the .gitignore file to work properly.
I'm attempting to ignore directories that contain image and audio files, as these aren't best stored on Github.
I've placed a .gitignore file in the root directory of the repository, and put rules in it to ignore the aforementioned directories, but can't push the repo to GH without pushing several thousand PNGs and WAVs.
Do I need to put my .gitignore inside of my .git folder?
Do I need to reinitialize the repository since I added the .gitignore after initialization?
Here is the content of my .gitignore
sprites/images/
sound/audio/
There are two ways to solve this:
Put two .gitignore files into sprites/images and sound/audio, both containing just .. The dot matches the current directory and will therefore exclude the two directories.
Put one .gitignore into the root of the project, and add /sprites/images and /sound/audio (each one in it's own line). If you don't put a slash at the beginning, you will also exclude directories like src/sprites/images.
If you want a repository/machine specific gitignore that can not be put under version control, you can add your ignore lines to .git/info/exclude. Paths there will be relative from the project root (like in 2.), but as you can not check this file in and it does not get overridden when pulling, so you can add your personal ignores there.
Git will immediately detect the .gitignore file and any command issued from now on will respect it. Of course, you can commit it too, so every developer has it as well.
If you have already checked in those files, you can use git rm (note that this also removes the files from your disk!) and commit afterwards.
Or, if you want to remove the files from the entire history to shrink your repository size, you can rebase them out. Never rebase and force-push if you don't exactly know what this means for everyone else in the project. It will cause all changes that are not in your local repository (at any other developer and at GitHub) to be overriden.
git rm -r --cached .
git add .
git commit -m "Appropriate message"
git push origin branch_name
I am setting up my first project in Git. How do I setup git-ignore file in Windows?
I am creating my first Rails project using Vagrant and trying to configure .gitignore in Windows
Easy.
Make a file .gitignore using your text editor
In there, write the file name you'd want to ignore
You can use wildcard like: *.pyc ignoring any file with extension .pyc
If you use TortoiseGit or other Git software, it will be easier. There will be add to ignore list menu when you right click to a file.
It seems that for ignoring files and directories there are two main ways:
.gitignore
Placing .gitignore file into the root of your repo besides .git
folder (in Windows make sure you see the true file extension and then
make .gitignore.
Making global configuration %HOMEPATH%\.gitignore_global and running
git config --global core.excludesfile %HOMEPATH%\.gitignore_global
to add this to your git config.
Note: files tracked before can be untracked by running git rm --cached filename. This absolutely critical for repos that existed BEFORE you created the .gitignore
Repo exclude
For local files that doesn't need to be shared, you just add file pattern or directory to file .git\info\exclude. These rules are not committed, so are not seen by other collaborators in your project. These are machine specific configs.
Windows does not allow you to create a "dotfile" (i.e., a file whose name begins with a dot). There are three simple ways to create a .gitignore in Windows, though. In each case, you want the .gitignore in your project's root directory.
In your text editor, create a file and "Save" or "Save As". Name the file ".gitignore" and the text editor works around the OS's limitation. I use Sublime Text 3 and Vim. This method works for both (Vim would use the command :w, though).
A fallback would be to create an empty (for now) text file and save it as .gitignore.txt then go into the command shell and rename the file to .gitignore (using the command line). That will do it.
Git Bash (available in the git installer for Windows) has the "touch" command and it will create dotfiles. At the Git Bash prompt enter the command "touch .gitignore" and an empty file is created if no file existed with that name.
Add your exclusion rules inside the .gitignore file:
Starting point. This repo will give you sample exclusion patterns for (i) Windows, (ii) Rails and (iii) Vagrant. You could add those to a global gitignore file.
GitIgnore / Patterns. This section of the Git Manual explains the patterns to use in your new gitignore file. Basically, you exclude directories and files that don't need version control.
To add to previous answers that you should use a text editor to create the .gitignore file, I usually first run dir > .gitignore from a Windows command prompt or Powershell window.
This outputs the entire directory listing to a file named .gitignore .
Then it's very easy to use a text editor (e.g., Notepad ++ or Atom) to modify the file from the directory listing and not miss a file or mistype a file name.
For Windows 10 I used:
ls > .gitignore
to create a clean .gitignore file ready to just delete lines where using 'dir' I would have had to also edit out all the explanatory directory text. I needed this when vscode told me I had 5K changes after I added a virtual environment to an existing project.
This question already has answers here:
How to make git ignore changes in case?
(6 answers)
Closed 10 months ago.
There are a couple of files in our git-controlled codebase that I'd like to rename. Specifically, I just want to change the case of the file, so that sourceCode.java becomes SourceCode.java, for example. The catch: I'm on a Windows box, and the filesystem thinks those are the same file name.
How can I get Windows and Git to recognize that change and check it in?
The change of the file name should not be ignored, but committed to git.
To rename the file you can use the standard git mv command.
Since Windows treats files with only changes in case as identical, you have to pass the -f option to force a rename:
git mv -f name.java Name.java
If instead you want to ignore case changes, have a look at the question
How to make git ignore changes in case?.
If you are on a FAT file system your only choice is to do a two stage rename:
Rename sourceCode.java to anything.you.like
Rename anything.you.like to SourceCode.java
Back in the days when we used Perforce we had exactly this problem and this was the only solution we could come up with.
The following steps allowed me to change the case on Windows:
Add ignorecase = false to [core] in .git/config;
Move the files you are going to rename out of your project directory;
Add the deletes to the index;
Move all files back to their original location and change the case of the files and/or directories;
Add all "new" files to the index;
Remove ignorecase = false added at the first step.
This way you have a single commit that contains the rename and it makes it easy to change e.g. an entire directory.
In my opinion one simple way is missing. You can do this for a single file, a specific directory or even the whole repository. Just rename your files in any way you like before and than execute these commands:
git rm --cached <file name or directory>
git add <file name or directory>
If you want to affect also the sub-directories, you have to use the -r flag:
git rm -r --cached <directory>
git add <directory>
Be careful. Doing this can lead to changes that are impossible to merge. Git gets confused when merging on Windows because it can't decide whether the old Uppercase name and the new lowercase name are the same file or not (for Git they are not, but for the filesystem they are). To merge you have to do some manual workaround like deleting the files before merging.
See Git rebase issue with files of same name but different case
I'm not sure if this issue is worse than having an unconventionally-named file in your project for ever and ever, but it is worth knowing about if there are lots of users with lots of branches which will all need to be merged eventually.
With NTFS (or FAT), a single git mv command does not solve the problem.
This question shows a technique that works:
git mv and only change case of directory
How can I ignore directories or folders in Git using msysgit on Windows?
Create a file named .gitignore in your project's directory. Ignore directories by entering the directory name into the file (with a slash appended):
dir_to_ignore/
More information is here.
By default, Windows Explorer will display .gitignore when in fact the file name is .gitignore.txt.
Git will not use .gitignore.txt
And you can't rename the file to .gitignore, because Windows Explorer thinks it's a file of type gitignore without a name.
Non command line solution:
You can rename a file to ".gitignore.", and it will create ".gitignore"
It seems that for ignoring files and directories there are two main ways:
.gitignore
Placing .gitignore file into the root of your repository besides the .git folder (in Windows, make sure you see the true file extension and then make .gitignore. (with the point at the end to make an empty file extension))
Making the global configuration ~/.gitignore_global and running git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global to add this to your Git configuration
Note: files tracked before can be untracked by running git rm --cached filename
Repository exclude - For local files that do not need to be shared, you just add the file pattern or directory to the file .git/info/exclude. Theses rules are not committed, so they are not seen by other users. More information is here.
To make exceptions in the list of ignored files, see this question.
To ignore an entire directory place a .gitignore of “*” there.
For example,
Example System
/root/
.gitignore
/dirA/
someFile1.txt
someFile2.txt
/dirB/
.gitignore
someFile3.txt
someFile4.txt
Goal
ignore the contents of dirB/
Top Level (/root/.gitignore)
You could just “dirB/“ here
Ignored Directory (/root/dirB/.gitignore)
Or you could “*” here
Git watches for gitignore at every step of the file system. So here I choose dirB/.gitignore as “*” to ignore dirB/, including all files and subdirs within.
Done ☺️
To instruct Git to ignore certain files or folders, you have to create .gitignore file.
But in Windows Explorer you have to provide a name for the file. You just cannot create file with just an extension. The trick is that create a empty text file and go to command prompt and change the name of the file to .gitignore:
ren "New Text Document.txt" .gitignore
Now open the file with your favorite text editor and add the file/folder names you wish you ignore. You can also use wildcards like this: *.txt.
I had some issues creating a file in Windows Explorer with a . at the beginning.
A workaround was to go into the commandshell and create a new file using "edit".
If you want to maintain a folder and not the files inside it, just put a ".gitignore" file in the folder with "*" as the content. This file will make Git ignore all content from the repository. But .gitignore will be included in your repository.
$ git add path/to/folder/.gitignore
If you add an empty folder, you receive this message (.gitignore is a hidden file)
The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files:
path/to/folder/.gitignore
Use -f if you really want to add them.
fatal: no files added
So, use "-f" to force add:
$ git add path/to/folder/.gitignore -f
You can create the ".gitignore" file with the contents:
*
!.gitignore
It works for me.
In Windows there's an extra catch with slashes. Excluding a single directory in .gitignore with
dir_to_exclude/
will possibly work, but excluding all directories with
/
causes problems when you have file names with spaces (like my file.txt) in your directory: Git Bash escapes these spaces with a backslash (like my\ file.txt) and Git for Windows doesn't distinguish between / and \.
To exclude all directories, better use:
**/
Two consecutive asterisks signify directory contents.
Just in case you need to exclude sub folders you can use the ** wildcard to exclude any level of sub directory.
**/build/output/Debug/
Also in your \.git\info projects directory there is an exclude file that is effectively the same thing as .gitignore (I think). You can add files and directories to ignore in that.
When everything else fails try editing the file
/.git/info/exclude
and adding the directories you want to the end of the file, like this:
# git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~
assets/
compiled/
I added the folders "assets" and "compiled" to the list of files and directories to ignore.
I've had some problems getting Git to pick up the .gitignore file on Windows. The $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file always seems to work though.
The downside of this approach, however, is that the files in the $GIT_DIR directory are not included in the check-in, and therefore not shared.
p.s. $GIT_DIR is usually the hidden folder named .git
On Unix:
touch .gitignore
On Windows:
echo > .gitignore
These commands executed in a terminal will create a .gitignore file in the current location.
Then just add information to this .gitignore file (using Notepad++ for example) which files or folders should be ignored. Save your changes. That's it :)
More information: .gitignore
I assume the problem is that your working tree is like:
a-cache/foo
a-cache/index.html
b-cache/bar
b-cache/foo
b-cache/index.html
.gitignore
... with the .gitignore you describe. This will give you git status output like:
$ git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# .gitignore
# a-cache/
# b-cache/
... if the index.html files have not yet been added to the repository. (Git sees that there are unignored files in the cache directories, but it only reports the directories.) To fix this, make sure that you have added and committed the index.html files:
git add *cache/index.html
git commit -m "Adding index.html files to the cache directories"
... and your git status will then look like:
$ git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# .gitignore
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
(Obviously you do want to commit .gitignore as well. I was just being lazy with this test case.)
On Windows and Mac, if you want to ignore a folder named Flower_Data_Folder in the current directory, you can do:
echo Flower_Data_Folder >> .gitignore
If it's a file named data.txt:
echo data.txt >> .gitignore
If it's a path like "Data/passwords.txt"
echo "Data/passwords.txt" >> .gitignore.
I had similar issues. I work on a Windows tool chain with a shared repository with Linux guys, and they happily create files with the same (except for case) names in a given folder.
The effect is that I can clone the repository and immediately have dozens of 'modified' files that, if I checked in, would create havoc.
I have Windows set to case sensitive and Git to not ignore case, but it still fails (in the Win32 API calls apparently).
If I gitignore the files then I have to remember to not track the .gitignore file.
But I found a good answer here:
http://archive.robwilkerson.org/2010/03/02/git-tip-ignore-changes-to-tracked-files/index.html
Just create .gitignore file in your project folder Then add the name of the folder in it for ex:
frontend/node_modules
This might be extremely obvious for some, but I did understand this from the other answers.
Making a .gitignore file in a directory does nothing by itself. You have to open the .gitignore as a text file and write the files/directories you want it to ignore, each on its own line.
so cd to the Git repository directory
touch .gitignore
nano .gitignore
and then write the names of the files and or directories that you want to be ignored and their extensions if relevant.
Also, .gitignore is a hidden file on some OS (Macs for example) so you need ls -a to see it, not just ls.
Temporarily ignore a directory/file that was already in git:
I have a lot of projects in a multi-project gradle project and they can take a long time to delete them, and they're all pretty much the same but different. From time to time I want to remove those from the gradle build by deleting them altogether. git can get them back after all. However I don't want them showing up in git status either. So I use the following simple procedure;
delete files and folders I don't want.
verify build still works
tell git to ignore the deleted files for a bit (we can get them back)
git ls-files --deleted -z | git update-index --assume-unchanged -z
--stdin
go about life without the dirs until you want them back. Then run the same command as before but switch out assume-unchanged for no-assume-unchanged
git ls-files --deleted -z | git update-index --no-assume-unchanged -z
--stdin