Apply .gitignore on an existing repository already tracking large number of...

pasta_paul

I have an existing Visual Studio project in my repository. I recently added a .gitignore file under my project and I assume that tells Git to ignore the files listed in the file. My problem is that all those files are already being tracked and as far as I know Git will not ignore a file that was already tracked before a rule was added to this file to ignore it. It was suggested to use: git rm --cached and manually un-track them but that's going...

Originally asked by Tohid on Stack Exchange (stackoverflow) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

This answer solved my problem: First of all, commit all pending changes. Then run this command: git rm -r --cached . This removes everything from the index, then just run: git add . Commit it: git commit -m ".gitignore is now working" Please be careful, when you push this to a repository and pull from somewhere else into a state where those files are still tracked, the files will be DELETED

Full answer by Tohid: https://stackoverflow.stackexchange.com/a/19757964 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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