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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