From the relevant Git documentation: Patterns which are specific to a particular repository but which do not need to be shared with other related repositories (e.g., auxiliary files that live inside the repository but are specific to one user’s workflow) should go into the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file. The .git/info/exclude file has the same format as any … Read more
If you exclude application/, then everything under it will always be excluded (even if some later negative exclusion pattern (“unignore”) might match something under application/). To do what you want, you have to “unignore” every parent directory of anything that you want to “unignore”. Usually you end up writing rules for this situation in pairs: … Read more
An optional prefix ! which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again. If a negated pattern matches, this will override lower precedence patterns sources. # Ignore everything * # But not these files… !.gitignore !script.pl !template.latex # etc… # …even if they are in subdirectories !*/ # … Read more
.gitkeep isn’t documented, because it’s not a feature of Git. Git cannot add a completely empty directory. People who want to track empty directories in Git have created the convention of putting files called .gitkeep in these directories. The file could be called anything; Git assigns no special significance to this name. There is a … Read more
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 … Read more
.gitignore will prevent untracked files from being added (without an add -f) to the set of files tracked by Git, however Git will continue to track any files that are already being tracked. To stop tracking a file you need to remove it from the index. This can be achieved with this command. git rm … Read more