Remove ignored files / directory from Git repository

Adding a .gitignore file to our repo allows us to specify which files we don’t need to be tracked in our git repo. If we initially added the .gitignore file with the file & directory names to be ignored, git never track those files & directories. But if the files / directory are already in our git repo, the files / directory will continue there. Now we need to manually delete them from repo.

Remove files / directory by manually selecting files

git rm --cached file_1 file_2 dir_1

Remove files / directory from .gitignore file

git rm --cached `git ls-files -i -c --exclude-from=.gitignore`

The above command lists all files / directory to be excluded as per .gitignore file and deletes them.

If the above command does not work, try the following command instead.

git ls-files -i -c --exclude-from=.gitignore | xargs git rm --cached

This command creates separate rm commands for each file & folder mentioned in .gitignore file, using xargs command.

Now we have to commit the changes.

git add .
git commit -m "Drop files from .gitignore"
git push

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This article was published on May 2, 2022

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