Git - Apply gitignore on an existing repository already tracking large number of files

Questions

I have an existing Visual Studio project in my repository. I recently added a .gitignore file under my project and I assume that tells Git to ignore the files listed in the file.

My problem is that all those files are already being tracked and as far as I know Git will not ignore a file that was already tracked before a rule was added to this file to ignore it.

It was suggested to use: git rm --cached and manually un-track them but that s going to take me forever to go through them one by one.

I thought about deleting the repository and recreating it again but this time with .gitignore file present, but there must be a better way to do this.

Answers

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1139762/gitignore-file-not-ignoring http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1139762/gitignore-file-not-ignoring

Commit all pending changes, then run this command:

git rm -r --cached .

This removes everything from the index, then just run:

git add .

Commit it:

git commit -m ".gitignore is now working"

Source

License : cc by-sa 3.0

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19663093/apply-gitignore-on-an-existing-repository-already-tracking-large-number-of-files

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