Git ignore deleted files

Question

Ok heres my situation.

I have a website project that has more than 50,000 unimportant files (to development) in some directories.

/website.com/files/1.txt
/website.com/files/2.txt
/website.com/files/3.txt
/website.com/files/etc.txt

The stuff in /files is already in the repo. I want to delete all the files in /files on my local copy but I want git to ignore it so it doesn't delete them when I do a pull on the web server.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Ok Ive found a solution. Simply create a new repo in the sub directories and the parent repo will ignore them.

Answer 2

Creating a sub-repo is one solution, but you should make that sub-repo a submodule.

That way:

• you keep a link between your normal content and that 'files' content
• if the 'files' content evolves one day, you can register its evolution in the main repo
• you can checkout your main repo without " git submodule update " (that is without filling the 'files' content
• on deployment, a git submodule update after the git submodule init will be enough to get back the right version of the 'files' content.

Answer 3

The code below works on deleted as well as modified files to ignore it when you do a git status.

 git update-index --assume-unchanged dir-im-removing/

or a specific file

git update-index --assume-unchanged config/database.yml

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/655243/ignore-modified-but-not-committed-files-in-git/761116#761116

Beware: The suggestion above for deleted files when you do a "git commit -am " includes the deleted file!

A solution that would work for me is to instead of deleting the file, just make it's content blank. This is what I used to mute a .htaccess file.