.gitignore is not ignoring directories

Question

What I did:

I think there were some weird configurations from the github gui that caused this issue and prevented me from being able to easily use git from command line or even git-bash.

I ended up just uninstalling github and git then reinstalling just git for windows. I now have everything running off the command line(except ssh which I run from git-bash). Much easier and more reliable that the github gui.

Thanks to mu 無 for taking the time to try to figure this out. I didn't end up using his answer, but if I hadn't needed to do a reinstall of git it would have been what I needed to do.

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I am using the github gui on my local machine. I just noticed that a commit I was about to make was going to update all of my recently update node modules. I set up my .gitignore to ignore the entire node_modules/ directory.

I'm not sure what to do about this. All the file types I included in .gitignore were ignored. It's just the directories that it seems to ignore.

Here is my .gitignore file:

################# ## Sublime Text #################  *.sublime-project *.sublime-workspace  ################# ## Images #################  *.jpg *.jpeg *.png *.gif *.psd *.ai  ################# ## Windows detritus #################  # Windows image file caches Thumbs.db ehthumbs.db  # Folder config file Desktop.ini  # Recycle Bin used on file shares $RECYCLE.BIN/  # Mac crap .DS_Store  ################# ## Directories #################  dev/ cms/core/config/ node_modules/ 

Answer 1

Since the node_modules directory is already tracked as part of the repository, the .gitignore rule will not apply to it.

You need to untrack the directory from git using

git rm -r --cached node_modules git commit -m "removing node_modules" 

You can run the above 2 in git-bash.

After this, the .gitignore rule will ignore the directory away.

Note that this will remove the directory node_modules from your other repos once you pull the changes in. Only the original repo where you made that commit will still have the node_modules folder there.