Question

I just inherited an existing codebase that has multiple configuration files in it. These configuration files are all generic, meant to be edited and customized for each machine they are downloaded to. Git is (obviously) telling me that they have been edited and is always showing them under “changes not staged for commit” every time I do a git status. How can I ignore these files under git? Adding them to .gitignore doesn’t work because they are already being tracked by git. I don’t want to commit anything to the repo, but at the same time I want to tell git not to track these files anymore on my local machine. Is there a way of doing this that I’m not aware of? I know I can git stash them and they won’t be shown anymore, but I feel that is not really what it was meant for… Am I wrong?

Not sure if this changes anything, but I am using git-svn on my local machine to interact with the SVN server.

Answer 1

I do something like David Schwartz suggests, which is to create something like shell/template configurations like database.yml.template and then copy that file and configure it for my environment as database.yml. Then I can .gitignore those new files.

If you want to do it without modifying how the files exist in repo, then:

git update-index --assume-unchanged [filename]

Will make git ignore changes to that file, but you have to be conscious of doing it.

More information here: http://gitready.com/intermediate/2009/02/18/temporarily-ignoring-files.html