Force git to ignore a directory and all present and future files within

Question

So, I'm a newbie at git, but I'm using it because I have my rails app deployed through heroku. My app generates a bookmarklet (which is just a js file) for each user upon sign-up. Unfortunately, when I deploy, all of the bookmarklets for the users on the live site get overwritten with the bookmarklets for the users on my dev environment. I've read some other questions about this kind of thing, and I know I'll have to add the bookmarklet folder to the .gitignore file, and something about rm --cache (but I'm not sure exactly what I'll have to do). I tried doing these things, but I'm wondering if the problem is that git is ignoring all of the files that are there now, but isn't ignoring the ones that are generated after doing the whole gitignore process. Either that or I'm just doing it wrong (this is very, very likely).

Any help is welcome. And sorry that this covers the same ground as a lot of other similar questions. I did as much research as I could.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here some simple steps:

1. Create a file .gitignore in the root of your repository, with the following simple content:

   /path/to_your/folder
   

2. Add the file to your repository:

   git add .gitignore
   

3. Remove the folder from your repository (this won’t physically delete the folder):

   git rm --cached /path/to_your/folder
   

4. Commit

   git commit
   

After that, the folder should be removed from your repository and subsequent changes in it will be ignored by git.

Answer 2

Sounds like Heroku is cleaning out every file not checked in to your Git repository when you deploy. Modify your app to save the bookmarklets to a directory outside of your Git repository.