gitignore does not ignore folder

Question

I'm guessing this folder has been checked into git before?

Run git rm -r --cached <folder> and check again.

For me, the accepted answer was part of the solution, not the entire solution. Maybe, the other steps that I'm about to post were obvious, but I missed them first. Here's the steps I took to ensure my .gitignore file ignored the folder I wanted it to ignore:

1. Commit any changes that you need to fix/change.
2. Run this command: git rm -r --cached . (which removes everything from the git index in order to refresh your git repository)
3. Then run this command: git add . (to add everything back to the repo)
4. Finally, commit these changes using git commit -m ".gitignore Fixed"

You can find the link to the article from where I found the solution here.

I was having this issue and I realized git was actually ignoring the files/folders correctly, but my code editor (Visual Studio Code) was just buggy and not "greying them out" properly in the UI sidebar. I restarted VSCode and they were greyed out as expected.

As an addition to the accepted answer

git rm -r --cached /foo/bar/
git status

When i do that, the terminal shows a bunch of rm for files in that directory. So to prevent another commit that might unnecessarily affect remote, I i did:

git reset HEAD *
git status

After that, it said nothing to commit and when i modify files inside /foo/bar/ and do a git status i still get nothing to commit.

This solved it

I had done echo node_modules >> .gitignore and it didn't work.

the windows terminal from saves the file in UCS-2 LE BOM and git doesn't seem to accept that.

I opened the file with Notepad and saved with UTF-8 encoding

It Works now.

I think they need to fix this since echo "filetoignore" >> .gitignore actually seems a handy thing to do