I recently inherited a project from a beginning developer. After inheriting the project I realized that, while the developer was using Git to source control the project, the developer had completely forgot to add a .gitignore
.
This meant that I now needed to add a .gitignore
file as well as remove files from git that were tracked that shouldn’t have been tracked.
This isn’t usually a big deal when ignoring a single file or two — The command to remove a single file is:
git rm --cached <file>
But, since we use Grunt and Sass for our web development projects, there were a ton of files within node_modules
and .sass_cache
as well as .DS_Store
files throughout.
To get around writing multiple commands to ignore all of these files and un-track them, I did this:
git rm -r --cached .
git add -A
git commit -am 'Removing ignored files'
The first command will un-track all files in your git repository.
The second command will then add all of the files in your git repository, except those that match rules in your .gitignore
. Thus, we have un-tracked several files with just two commands.
Then the last command is to commit the changes, which will just be removed files.
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