Git - Ignore files during merge

Question

I got over this issue by using git merge command with the --no-commit option and then explicitly removed the staged file and ignore the changes to the file. E.g.: say I want to ignore any changes to myfile.txt I proceed as follows:

git merge --no-ff --no-commit <merge-branch>
git reset HEAD myfile.txt
git checkout -- myfile.txt
git commit -m "merged <merge-branch>"

You can put statements 2 & 3 in a for loop, if you have a list of files to skip.

I ended up finding git attributes. Trying it. Working so far. Did not check all scenarios yet. But it should be the solution.

Merge Strategies - Git attributes

.gitattributes - is a root-level file of your repository that defines the attributes for a subdirectory or subset of files.

You can specify the attribute to tell Git to use different merge strategies for a specific file. Here, we want to preserve the existing config.xml for our branch. We need to set the merge=foo to config.xml in .gitattributes file.

merge=foo tell git to use our(current branch) file, if a merge conflict occurs.

1. Add a .gitattributes file at the root level of the repository

2. You can set up an attribute for confix.xml in the .gitattributes file

    <pattern> merge=foo
   

   Let's take an example for config.xml

    config.xml merge=foo
   

3. And then define a dummy foo merge strategy with:

    $ git config --global merge.foo.driver true
   

If you merge the stag form dev branch, instead of having the merge conflicts with the config.xml file, the stag branch's config.xml preserves at whatever version you originally had.

for more reference: merge_strategies

You could start by using git merge --no-commit, and then edit the merge however you like i.e. by unstaging config.xml or any other file, then commit. I suspect you'd want to automate it further after that using hooks, but I think it'd be worth going through manually at least once.

Example:

1. You have two branches: master, develop
2. You created file in develop branch and want to ignore it while merging

Code:

git config --global merge.ours.driver true
git checkout master
echo "path/file_to_ignore merge=ours" >> .gitattributes
git merge develop

You can also ignore files with same extension

for example all files with .txt extension:

echo "*.txt merge=ours" >> .gitattributes

You could use .gitignore to keep the config.xml out of the repository, and then use a post commit hook to upload the appropriate config.xml file to the server.

As commented by many it should be noted that the accepted answer and the copies of it (using a custom merge strategy for a specific file or files) only works in cases where there would be actual merge conflicts.

2 simple cases that would not result in merge conflicts and therefore commits getting merged:

• You have a config.xml file in a feature branch and not in master. You want to exclude it during merge
• Your config.xml file in both branches are based off the same commit. New code is added to the file in feature.

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Either use merge --no-commit as demonstrated by unmesh-gurjar or simply cherry-pick invidiual commits into master. The latter being rather cumbersome of course and coming with a couple of other pitfalls (new SHA1 IDs etc.)