Why doesn't Git ignore my specified file?

Question

I added the following line to .gitignore:

sites/default/settings.php

but when I type git status it shows the file

Answer 1

.gitignore will only ignore files that you haven't already added to your repository.

If you did a git add ., and the file got added to the index, .gitignore won't help you. You'll need to do git rm sites/default/settings.php to remove it, and then it will be ignored.

Answer 2

Make sure the .gitignore does not have a extension!! It can't be .gitignore.txt, in windows just name the file .gitignore. and it will work.

Answer 3

I had the same problem. Files defined in .gitingore where listed as untracked files when running git status.

The reason was that the .gitignore file was saved in UTF-16LE encoding, and not in UTF8 encoding.

After changing the encoding of the .gitignore file to UTF8 it worked for me.

Answer 4

There are instances e.g. Application Configuration files, which I want tracked in git (so .gitignore will not work), but that I need to change for local settings. I do not want git to manage these files or show them as modified. To do this I use skip-worktree:

git update-index --skip-worktree path/to/file

You can confirm files are skipped by listing files and checking for lines starting with S for skipped

git ls-files -v | grep ^S

If in the future you want to have git manage the file locally again simply run:

 git update-index --no-skip-worktree path/to/file

Mescalito above had a great answer, that led me down the right track but

git update-index --assume-unchanged file/to/ignore.php

Has a contract with git that in which : the user promises not to change the file and allows Git to assume that the working tree file matches what is recorded in the index.

However, I change the content of the files, so in my case --skip-worktree is the better option.

Toshiharu Nishina's website provided an excellent explanation of skip-worktree vs assume-unchanged: Ignore files already managed with Git locally

Answer 5

I just tried this with git 1.7.3.1, and given a structure like:

repo/.git/
repo/.gitignore
repo/sites/default/settings.php

where repo thus is the "root" mentioned above (I would call it the root of your working tree), and .gitignore contains only sites/default/settings.php, the ignore works for me (and it does not matter whether .gitignore is added to the repo or not). Does this match your repo layout? If not, what differs?

Answer 6

Just in case anyone in the future has the same problem that I did:

If you use the

*
!/**/
!*.*

trick to remove binary files with no extension, make sure that ALL other gitignore lines are BELOW. Git will read from .gitignore from the top, so even though I had 'test.go' in my gitignore, it was first in the file, and became 'unignored' after

!*.*