How to use gitignore command in git

Question

I\'m working first time on git. I have pushed my branch on github and it pushed all the library and documents into the github. Now what can I do and how can I use gitignore comm

Answer 1

git ignore is a convention in git. Setting a file by the name of .gitignore will ignore the files in that directory and deeper directories that match the patterns that the file contains. The most common use is just to have one file like this at the top level. But you can add others deeper in your directory structure to ignore even more patterns or stop ignoring them for that directory and subsequently deeper ones.

Likewise, you can "unignore" certain files in a deeper structure or a specific subset (ie, you ignore *.log but want to still track important.log) by specifying patterns beginning with !. eg:

*.log !important.log

will ignore all log files but will track files named important.log

If you are tracking files you meant to ignore, delete them, add the pattern to you .gitignore file and add all the changes

# delete files that should be ignored, or untrack them with 
# git rm --cached <file list or pattern>

# stage all the changes git commit
git add -A 

from now on your repository will not have them tracked.

If you would like to clean up your history, you can

# if you want to correct the last 10 commits
git rebase -i --preserve-merges HEAD~10 

then mark each commit with e or edit. Save the plan. Now git will replay your history stopping at each commit you marked with e. Here you delete the files you don't want, git add -A and then git rebase --continue until you are done. Your history will be clean. Make sure you tell you coworkers as you will have to force push and they will have to rebase what they didn't push yet.