Version Control with Git

Ignoring Things

What if we have files that we do not want Git to track for us, like blog post drafts or a file listing to-dos for yourself. Let’s create a few dummy files.

$ mkdir drafts
$ touch TODO.txt drafts/cancer-cure.txt drafts/solving-world-hunger.txt

and see what Git says:

$ git status

On branch master
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

    TODO.txt
    drafts/

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Putting these files under version control would be a waste of disk space. What’s worse, having them all listed could distract us from changes that actually matter, so let’s tell Git to ignore them.

We do this by creating a file in the root directory of our project called .gitignore. In the case of the template, it already exists.

$ cat .gitignore

_site
.DS_Store
.jekyll
.bundle
.sass-cache
Gemfile
Gemfile.lock
node_modules
package.json

We are going to edit it to ignore our TODO.txt file and our drafts folder.

$ nano .gitignore
$ cat .gitignore

_site
.DS_Store
.jekyll
.bundle
.sass-cache
Gemfile
Gemfile.lock
node_modules
package.json
TODO.txt
drafts/

The two new patterns at the end tell Git to ignore the file named TODO.txt as well as the entire drafts folder. (If any of these files were already being tracked, Git would continue to track them.)

Once we have updated this file, the output of git status is much cleaner:

$ git status

On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

    modified:   .gitignore

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

The only thing Git notices now is the updated .gitignore file. You might think we wouldn’t want to track it, but everyone we’re sharing our repository with will probably want to ignore the same things that we’re ignoring. Let’s add and commit .gitignore:

$ git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Add the ignore file"
$ git status

On branch master
nothing to commit, working directory clean

As a bonus, using .gitignore helps us avoid accidentally adding to the repository files that we don’t want to track:

$ git add drafts/cancer-cure.txt

The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files:
drafts/cancer-cure.txt
Use -f if you really want to add them.
fatal: no files added

If we really want to override our ignore settings, we can use git add -f to force Git to add something. We can also always see the status of ignored files if we want:

$ git status --ignored

On branch master
Ignored files:
  (use "git add -f <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

    TODO.txt
    drafts/

nothing to commit, working directory clean