Cannot ignore .idea/workspace.xml - keeps popping up

Question

I was facing the same issue, and it drove me up the wall. The issue ended up to be that the .idea folder was ALREADY commited into the repo previously, and so they were being tracked by git regardless of whether you ignored them or not. I would recommend the following, after closing RubyMine/IntelliJ or whatever IDE you are using:

mv .idea ../.idea_backup
rm .idea # in case you forgot to close your IDE
git rm -r .idea 
git commit -m "Remove .idea from repo"
mv ../.idea_backup .idea

After than make sure to ignore .idea in your .gitignore

Although it is sufficient to ignore it in the repository's .gitignore, I would suggest that you ignore your IDE's dotfiles globally.

Otherwise you will have to add it to every .gitgnore for every project you work on. Also, if you collaborate with other people, then its best practice not to pollute the project's .gitignore with private configuation that are not specific to the source-code of the project.

I had this problem just now, I had to do git rm -f .idea/workspace.xml now it seems to be gone (I also had to put it into .gitignore)

I had to:

• remove the file from git
• push the commit to all remotes
• make sure all other committers updated from remote

Commands

git rm -f .idea/workspace.xml
git remote | xargs -L1 git push --all

Other committers should run

git pull

In the same dir where you see the file appear do:

• rm .idea/workspace.xml
• git rm -f .idea/workspace.xml (as suggested by chris vdp)
• vi .gitignore
• i (to edit), add .idea/workspace.xml in one of the lines, Esc, :wq

You should be good now

To remove .idea/ completely from the git without affecting your IDE config you could just do:

git rm -r --cached '.idea/'
echo .idea >> .gitignore
git commit -am "removed .idea/ directory"

If you have multiple projects in your git repo, .idea/workspace.xml will not match to any files.

Instead, do the following:

$ git rm -f **/.idea/workspace.xml

And make your .gitignore look something like this:

# User-specific stuff:
**/.idea/workspace.xml
**/.idea/tasks.xml
**/.idea/dictionaries
**/.idea/vcs.xml
**/.idea/jsLibraryMappings.xml

# Sensitive or high-churn files:
**/.idea/dataSources.ids
**/.idea/dataSources.xml
**/.idea/dataSources.local.xml
**/.idea/sqlDataSources.xml
**/.idea/dynamic.xml
**/.idea/uiDesigner.xml

## File-based project format:
*.iws

# IntelliJ
/out/