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How do tell Source Tree to ignore certain files?

Phil Oxenberg

I'm a new SourceTree (and GitHub) user. For one of my repos I was able to specify that ceratin files were to be ignored and not "checked in or pushed" to GitHub. SourceTree honored my request. I also indicated that this should apply to all projects and it looks like that request was also honored. However, one of my specifications indicated all files under a certain folder, of course that folder has a different parent from project to project. So, my question is (again I'm a new user) for my latest project that was added to GitHub, how do I specify to Source Tree that certain files should be ignored. I'm not sure what state I have to get everything in in order for the ignore menuitem to become enabled. Also, from SourceTree, how do I delete a folder from GitHub (w/o deleting the folder from my local project on disk)?

Thank you very much,

Phil

Accepted answers

Tim Crall1

You can create a file called .gitignore within specific repos and list files (or patterns using *s) to be ignored. This all that SourceTree is doing when you use that option, and it may be easier to just edit the file manually. There is a lot of documentation out there on how to use .gitignore files. You can put a .ignore file at the top level of the repo and/or in any individual folder within the repo. The behavior inherits down.

Note that telling Git (SourceTree) to ignore a file does not remove that file from the repository if it has already been added. In git you would do this with git rm --cached (if you want to remove the file from the repo but not remove it from the working directory). In SourceTree, you can right-click on a file and select "Stop Tracking".

It's not really possible to delete a folder from a remote because that folder is present in whatever commits you've already pushed to the remote, and you can't remove a folder from a commit once its been committed. You can stop tracking the folder locally (without deleting it from the working directory) and then it won't be present in your next commit.

All comments

Tim Crall1

Phil Oxenberg

Thanks for the detailed and clear response.

Phil Oxenberg

I'm looking at the .gitignore file created in my local repo of the project where I successfully indicated through SourceTree to ignore .class files and some other files and they were ignored. However, the .gitignore file is empty. I'm confused.

Tim Crall1

If you checked the box for them to be ignored in all projects, the patterns would have been written to a .gitignore_global in your home directory.

octabytes

Look at your \.git\info\exclude

Makes anyone's life easier, especially if you work on a team with shared repositories.

Because.. .gitignore might be a good solution for you (for time being) but if someone (new in the future) is reading your ignore file will probably be confused about why certain files/paths are being excluded from the repository, and no one knows what implications removing them will have.

In my opinion, \.git\info\exclude is the way to go

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