Question

I have my website/cms tracked in git and it works rather well, except for my .htaccess file. The file needs to be substantially different depending which server I am running the code on (local/test/live). As a result, right now I’ve kept .htaccess out of git entirely (it’s in my .gitignore file). But occasionally it gets lost, and at any event it is a part of the site and I’d like it to remain tracked, but I don’t want it pushed to remote repositories where it might overwrite the correct configurations for the other servers. Is there any way to make git keep a file tracked, but only locally? (Or any other way to solve the problem?)

Answer 1

You can do this with Git’s sparse checkout feature. Run the following commands in a repo where you want a special, untracked .htaccess file:

git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo '*' >.git/info/sparse-checkout
echo '!.htaccess' >>.git/info/sparse-checkout
git read-tree --reset -u HEAD

This will first delete the existing .htaccess file. But now it’s ignored from Git’s perspective, so you can put a machine-specific one there and Git won’t bother you about it.

You can then add and manage a .htaccess file from some other repository (say your local one). Git will be happy to track this file and keep it in the repository, but on a machine with the above sparse checkout configuration, Git will ignore the local .htaccess file in that working directory, even if it is different from what’s in the repository.