.gitignore after commit [duplicate]

Question

No you cannot force a file that is already committed in the repo to be removed just because it is added to the .gitignore

You have to git rm --cached to remove the files that you don't want in the repo. ( --cached since you probably want to keep the local copy but remove from the repo. ) So if you want to remove all the exe's from your repo do

git rm --cached /\*.exe

(Note that the asterisk * is quoted from the shell - this lets git, and not the shell, expand the pathnames of files and subdirectories)

If you have not pushed the changes already:

git rm -r --cached .
git add .
git commit -m 'clear git cache'
git push

However, will it automatically remove these committed files from the repository?

No. Even with an existing .gitignore you are able to stage "ignored" files with the -f (force) flag. If they files are already commited, they don't get removed automatically.

git rm --cached path/to/ignored.exe

I had to remove .idea and target folders and after reading all comments this worked for me:

git rm -r .idea
git rm -r target
git commit -m 'removed .idea folder'

and then push to master