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

[Tim Crall · Accepted solution]

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.

[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 Crall]

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.

[Phil Oxenberg]

I did check that box, but can't find .gitignore_global anywhere on my local file system. What do you mean by home directory? Thanks.

[Tim Crall]

What kind of a computer are you working on? Windows or Mac?

[Phil Oxenberg]

Windows

[Tim Crall]

The home directory should be configured by your $HOME variable and is likely to be C:\users\username (at least that's how it is on my system). If you run Git Bash and type in "cd" with no arguments, it should take you there.

[Phil Oxenberg]

$HOME is defined as C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc but that Git folder doesn't exist. I found .gitconfig under c:\users\myUserName - bizarre!

[BillyP]

Git Bash in windows has gotten a lot better.  

Within Windows 10, you can run through Git Bash, all the normal git commands to get what you want.

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

You can also remove the '--global' to have it apply only to you current repo/ project.

git config core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

[Schroef]

the options is greyed out as well as stop tracking. When you add a gitnore to your repo its stuck in unstaged part and nothing seems to work

[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