How to use gitignore command in git
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.
If you dont have a .gitignore file, first use:
touch .gitignore
then this command to add lines in your gitignore file:
echo 'application/cache' >> .gitignore
Be careful about new lines
So based on what you said, these files are libraries/documentation you don't want to delete but also don't want to push to github. Let say you have your project in folder your_project and a doc directory: your_project/doc.
- Remove it from the project directory (without actually deleting it):
git rm --cached doc/* - If you don't already have a
.gitignore, you can make one right inside of your project folder:project/.gitignore. - Put
doc/*in the .gitignore - Stage the file to commit:
git add project/.gitignore - Commit:
git commit -m "message". - Push your change to
github.