.gitignore file in Sourcetree not working

Question

I am working on a maven project and I want to ignore the files generated and stored in the /target folder of my project (Evaluation) root folder.In the root of my git repository

Answer 1

Let's say we have a file that was inadvertently added to our repository:

stackoverflow$ echo this file is important > junkfile
stackoverflow$ git add junkfile
stackoverflow$ git ci -m 'added a file'

At some point, we realize that the file is unimportant so we add it to our .gitignore file:

stackoverflow$ echo junkfile >> .gitignore
stackoverflow$ git ci -m 'ignore junkfile' .gitignore

Later on, we make some changes to that file:

stackoverflow$ sed -i 's/ is / is not/' junkfile 

And of course, even though the file is listed in .gitignore, we have already told git that we want to track it, so git status shows:

stackoverflow$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes not staged for commit:
#   (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#   modified:   junkfile
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

We need to remove this file from the repository (without removing the file from our work tree). We can do this with the --cached flag to git rm:

stackoverflow$ git rm --cached junkfile
rm 'junkfile'

This stages the delete operation...

stackoverflow$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD ..." to unstage)
#
#   deleted:    junkfile
#

...so we need to commit it:

stackoverflow$ git commit -m 'removed junkfile from repository'
[master 19f082a] removed junkfile from repository
 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
 delete mode 100644 junkfile

Now if we run git status git will ignore this file:

stackoverflow$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit, working directory clean

Even though it's still here in our working tree:

stackoverflow$ cat junkfile 
this file is not important