Git ignore locally deleted folder

git ignore
Alexander Ljungberg picture Alexander Ljungberg · Jan 4, 2011 · Viewed 12.9k times · Source

I have a Ruby on Rails application which crashes when vendor/rails is present but works fine if it is not. I need to keep this folder deleted in my local copy so that I can work, but I don't want this deletion to ever be committed. Someone put it there for a reason.

So how do I delete this folder without it coming up in git status as a thousand deleted files? Obviously .gitignore won't work since you can't ignore files which are already tracked. Neither do any of the solutions listed here (git update-index --assume-unchanged) work.

Answer

Aristotle Pagaltzis picture Aristotle Pagaltzis · Jan 4, 2011 
 git ls-files --deleted -z | git update-index --assume-unchanged -z --stdin

Note that because this is an index-based operation, you cannot set directories to be ignored – only individual files. If upstream ever adds a file inside those directories, you will have to repeat the fix-up.

Related questions

How do I make Git ignore file mode (chmod) changes?

I have a project in which I have to change the mode of files with chmod to 777 while developing, but which should not change in the main repo. Git picks up on chmod -R 777 . and marks all files as changed. …

Read More
How to git ignore subfolders / subdirectories?

I have a lot of projects in my .Net solution. I would like to exclude all "bin/Debug" and "bin/Release" folders (and their contents), but still include the "bin" folder itself and any dll's contained therein. .gitignore with "bin/" …

Read More
How do I configure git to ignore some files locally?

Can I ignore files locally without polluting the global git config for everyone else? I have untracked files that are spam in my git status but I don't want to commit git config changes for every single little random untracked …

Read More