Can I add a .gitignore file just for me that overrides the project .gitignore?

Question

I am using Git in Android Studio on a OS X machine, and I would like to have a personal .gitignore file that overrides the .gitignore that are in the project (I want mine to ignore .iml files). Can this be done and how?

I have tried to create a .gitignore file in my home dir with the following lines in:

# Android Studio .*.iml *.iml

And the I have used this command to make git use my file git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore, but it does not work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Instead of creating a new .gitignore file, you should use the .git/info/exclude file to setup ignore rules specific to your clone of the repo.

So, basically, go to your project root, and run

cd $PROJECT_ROOT echo "*.iml" >> .git/info/exclude 

Note that the the pattern *.iml will take care of files of kind .*.iml as well, so you can make do with one ignore rule.

Also, this complements the existing ignore rules in .gitignore and ignore rules of .gitignore will still be applied.

---

It seems you are already tracking the .iml files in your Git repo, so you can try removing them from Git using

git rm -r *.iml git commit -m "removed *.iml" 

Note that this will untrack them from the master repository as well once you do a push.

Otherwise, you can use git update-index --assume-unchanged <filename> to ignore changes to those files locally. And afterwards, the gitignore rules should work all right.