How do I use .gitignore in a folder?

Question

I have an img folder within my git repository. I want to use .gitignore to exclude the images within the folder.

I used cd <file path> to enter that folder and mkdir .gitignore. But when I add the git the images are not excluded. What do I need to add to keep them excluded from the add?

Answer 1

The .gitignore file does not have any effect only by its mere presence. An empty .gitignore file is just an empty file, nothing more.

Git reads the content of the .gitignore file and uses the patterns it contains to decide what files to put in the repo and what files to ignore. Read more about the format of .gitignore files.

Contrary to what other answers to this question state, you can have a .gitignore file in any directory of your repository, not only in the root directory.

When it decides how to handle a new file (track it or ignore it) it combines the information from multiple gitignore sources:

• the command line;
• the .gitignore file in the same directory as the file and the .gitingore files in their parent directories inside the repo;
• the local repository ignore file (not pushed to the remote repos) $GIT_DIR/info/exclude;
• the global ignore file specified in ~/.gitconfig; it applies to all local repository of the user.

Back to your concrete situation, if you want to tell Git to ignore the files in the img directory you can put * in the file img/.gitignore.

Another option is to put <path-to-img>/* in the .gitignore file on the root directory of your repo. Replace <path-to-img> with the actual path from the root of the repo to the img file.

The content of the file .gitignore is used only by git add. If a file is already in the repository, adding in .gitignore a pattern that matches its name doesn't make Git ignore it from now on. It must be manually removed from the repo (and the removal committed), otherwise Git will continue to track its content.

In your situation, the commands to run are along these lines:

cd <path-to-img-directory>
echo "*" >> .gitignore
git rm *
git add .gitignore
git commit

Answer 2

Your .gitignore file should be in the repository's root directory to start with. It becomes easier to manage that way. You can then place separate .gitignore files in the subdirectories where you need to override the patterns defined in the root .gitignore file.

To exclude the img directory, simply add this line to .gitignore:

img/

If you want to make the exclusion case-insensitive, you can instead write:

[Ii]mg/

From the documentation:

If the pattern ends with a slash, it is removed for the purpose of the following description, but it would only find a match with a directory. In other words, foo/ will match a directory foo and paths underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a symbolic link foo.

As an aside, you can list the files that are currently ignored in your repository by using the git-ls-files command:

git ls-files --ignored --others --exclude-standard

where the --exclude-standard option tells Git to consider the patterns defined in the .git/info/exclude file, the repository's .gitignore file (both in the root directory and in all of the subdirectories) as well as the global .gitignore file.