How to add a folder to the .gitignore

Question

Maybe my Googling skills are lacking but this seems like a question that should give me back thousands of hits and yet, I can't find a straight answer.

Simple as this:

I do constant pushes to github to share with a remote developer. We both have npm and bower installed. No need to push these huge folders to github all the time. My node_modules are ignored. But I can't seem to get gitignore to ignore my bower_components folder

I'm not too savvy on cmd, I barely scratch the surface so if you ar going to suggest that, please don't assume I know what you are talking about. Otherwise if it is as easy as adding it to the file itself using an IDE, well, I did that and no cigar. Here is my .gtignore file for your review

# Logs
logs
*.log
npm-debug.log*

# Runtime data
pids
*.pid
*.seed

# Directory for instrumented libs generated by jscoverage/JSCover
lib-cov

# Coverage directory used by tools like istanbul
coverage

# nyc test coverage
.nyc_output

# Grunt intermediate storage (http://gruntjs.com/creating-plugins#storing-    task-files)
.grunt

# node-waf configuration
.lock-wscript

# Compiled binary addons (http://nodejs.org/api/addons.html)
build/Release

# Dependency directories
node_modules
jspm_packages
bower_components

# Optional npm cache directory
.npm

# Optional REPL history
.node_repl_history

Am I missing anything? How do I make the bower_components ignored?

Thank you

Answer 1

If you want to ignore folder, you need a trailing slash:

bower_components/

Then check if the rule apply with git check-ignore -v (the -v is important if you want to see the exact .gitignore file and line which causes a file to be ignored)

git check-ignore -v -- bower_components/afile

If that does not apply, then remove the content of that folder from the history of that repo:

git rm --cached -r -- bower_components/
git add .
git commit -m "Remove bower_components folder"

Then the .gitignore rule will take effect immediatly.