Add .gitignore to gitignore

Question

Is it possible to add the .gitignore file to .gitignore itself?

.gitignore

Doesn't work though

I don't want to see it in edited files

Numbers

why would you want to do that? just commit your changes. .gitignore is supposed to be part of your repository, listing file patterns that are junk for the project. – Birgit

.gitignore should be part of your repository, so that everyone on your team is ignoring or checking in the same files. Just because .gitignore is in your code folders somewhere doesn't mean you have to deploy it. – Pederson

possible duplicate of How do I tell Git to ignore ".gitignore"? – Litigable

you can use git rm --cached .gitignore and untracking .gitignore – Monarchism

The use case for ignoring .gitignore itself is if you want to just locally create a directory that should not be checked in and that no one else needs to know about. You should not have to check in my-local-hack/.gitignore when no one else should ever see that directory. – Felske

This is one of the epic questions in stackoverflow LOL – Pino

Answer 1

The .gitignore file's purpose is to prevent everyone who collaborates on a project from accidentally commiting some common files in a project, such as generated cache files. Therefore you should not ignore .gitignore, since it's supposed to be included in the repository.

If you want to ignore files in just one repository but want to avoid committing the ignore list (for example for personal files) you can add them to .git/info/exclude in that repository.

If you want to ignore certain files on every repository on your machine you can create the file ~/.gitignore_global and then run

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Philharmonic

Although this is a detailed answer, it doesn't answer the question. "Should not" doesn't mean you can't. In my particular case I have a symlink that contains a .gitignore file, and now when I want to commit, git tries to include that .gitignore file. This seems like a perfect use-case IMO. – Pair

Why to complicated things when simple answer is NO. – Cambrian

You can ignore the .gitignore file by adding it to the .gitignore file. I just tried it and it worked for me. – Barbarity

The solution with gitignore_global is quite interesting and elegant when you use tools that others does not. Someone asked me why I added intellij folders/files in the .gitignore but in my opinion it should not matter as everyone can use the tools they want. – Ferocious

the solution with gitignore_global is quite interesting when you use tools that others does not. Someone asked me why I added intellij folders/files in the .gitignore but in my opinion it should not matter as everyone can use the tools they want. – Ferocious

@Barbarity agreed. I added .gitignore to the .gitignore file and it worked fine for me as well. – Ailing

Here's how you should do this, create / edit the file .git/info/exclude to ignore your .gitignore file locally if you're like in my siguation. More generally, you can generally do git rm --cached .gitignore but it was advised that's a bad idea. Full answer here. What a nonconstructive and obstructive comment from vader here. They were probably having a bad day. Nonetheless, I agree that doing this will cause long term issues, especially if you push to your team's remote – Melson

Answer 2

A .gitignore can ignore itself if it's never been checked in:

mhaase@ubuntu:~$ git --version
git version 1.7.9.5
mhaase@ubuntu:~$ git init temp
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/mhaase/temp/.git/
mhaase@ubuntu:~$ cd temp
mhaase@ubuntu:~/temp$ touch .gitignore foo bar baz bat
mhaase@ubuntu:~/temp$ git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       .gitignore
#       bar
#       bat
#       baz
#       foo
mhaase@ubuntu:~/temp$ echo "foo" >> .gitignore
mhaase@ubuntu:~/temp$ echo ".gitignore" >> .gitignore
mhaase@ubuntu:~/temp$ git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       bar
#       bat
#       baz
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

If you check in .gitignore (before you tell it to ignore itself), then it will always show up in git status, even if you later modify it to ignore itself.

Hustler

Exactly, this is my case. I want to have a local .gitignore for working with git-svn, which no-one should see. So I just added it to itself and it just worked. But then I googled to see if some uptight people will explain to others how this is "bad". This answer should be accepted, and then I would upvote the .git/info/exclude suggestions also. So it just needs to be untracked... Not very surprising, at least if you've ever been "subverted" (svn). – Stendhal

I have .gitignore file got backup first. Then I use git rm .gitignore and commit that change. At last, add and commit .gitignore file again with rule for .gitignore. It works! – Grandmother

To fix this you can run git rm --cached .gitignore. – Temptress

Makes perfect sense. .gitignore ignores untracked files. If the .gitignore file itself is untracked, it can ignore itself too. Yes, this violates the original purpose of .gitignore but that doesn't mean it can't be used this way. – Snuffy

Answer 3

There's not really a good reason to do this. If you want files ignored for your clone only, add them to .git/info/exclude, not in .gitignore file.

Provitamin

i am getting "Cannot complete the operation because of existing changes to the following file" and the file it lists it the one I have in exclude. Any idea why? – Hardeman

Answer 4

After you enter .gitignore in your gitignore file, try the following,

git rm -r --cached .
git add --all
git commit -m "ignoring gitignore"
git push --set-upstream origin master

It should work although like already said, ignoring gitignore can be counter-productive if your repo is shared by multiple users.

Evyn

git rm -r --cached . is what I needed to apply the changes in .gitignore file – Thirteen

Answer 5

Yes you can; you still see it in edited files because it is still tracked by git, and files tracked by git are always marked as modified even if they are in .gitignore. So simply untrack it.

But why not committing or resetting changes that you have on it? It's a much better way to remove it from status... Also be aware that any fresh clone of you repo will have to add its .gitignore, which can be annoying.

Justicz

Yes, and you will need to remove it separately from git by got rm --cached .gitignore, probably. – Fidel

the git rm --cached .gitignore is removing from git. That is destructive and not desirable. How to just have .gitignore ignored for the local clone? – Wartburg

Answer 6

Adding the folder or files into .git/info/exclude will help us in retaining the folder changes as well as not committing the changes to the repository.

In My case, I had a CMD folder which contained the .bat files, which I wrote to run the commands on the repository.

making the above changes in the .git/info/exclude file helped me in achieving my requirement.

Checkmate