Git - Won't add files?

Question

I'm having issues where I can't add files to my repository.

I'm using GIT on windows, in Aptana Studio for some Ruby development.

I've managed to push a few files up to GitHub, but then after this, everything's stopped working. I have for example a new sub-folder in my master directory, with 2 ruby files inside. If I call "git add .", and then "git status" and it keeps saying "working directory clean" and has nothing to commit.

I've tried "git add folder/myfile.rb" and still nothing.

Anyone any idea's what I can try?

Answer 1

I found myself in a similar situation as the poster:

If I call "git add .", and then "git status" and it keeps saying "working directory clean" and has nothing to commit.

But I had a different solution than what's here. Since I came to this first, I hope to save others some time.

From the above answers and what I've seen elsewhere, the usual fixes to this problem are:

• Ensure there are actually saved changes on the file in question
• Ensure the file doesn't meet your exclude rules in .gitignore and .git/info/exclude
• Ensure you're not trying to add an empty folder. Git won't track those. Standard solution is to place a blank file named .gitkeep as a placeholder so git will track the folder.

In my case, I had originally tried to create a git repo around an existing repo (not knowing it was there). I had removed the .git folder from this sub repo a while ago, but I didn't realize that it was too late, and git was already tracking it as a submodule. You can read more about how these behave and how to remove them here, but

• the solution for me was to simply run git rm --cached path_to_submodule.

Answer 2

To add to the possible solutions for other users:

Make sure you have not changed the case of the folder name in Windows:

I had a similar problem where a folder called Setup controlled by Git and hosted on GitHub, all development was done on a Windows machine.

At some point I changed the folder to setup (lower case S). From that point on when I added new files to the setup folder they were stored in the setup folder and not the Setup folder, but I guess because I was developing on a Windows machine the existing Setup folder in git/github was not changed to setup.

The result was that I couldn't see all of the files in the setup in GitHub. I suspect that if I cloned the project on a *nix machine I would have seen two folders, Setup and setup.

So make sure you have not changed the case of the containing folder on a Windows machine, if you have then I'd suggest:

• Renaming the folder to something like setup-temp
• git add -A
• git commit -m "Whatever"
• Rename the folder back to what you want
• git add -A
• git commit -m "Whatever"