git: can i commit a file and ignore the content changes?

Question

every developer on my team has their own local configuration. that configuration information is stored in a file called "devtargets.rb" which is used in our rake build tasks. i don't want developers to clobber each other's devtargets file, though.

my first thought was to put that file in the .gitignore list so that it is not committed to git.

then i started wondering: is it possible to commit the file, but ignore changes to the file? so, i would commit a default version of the file and then when a developer changes it on their local machine, git would ignore the changes and it wouldn't show up in the list of changed files when you do a git status or git commit.

is that possible? it would certainly be a nice feature...

Answer 1

Common practice seems to be to create a devtargets.default.rb and commit it, and then instruct each user to copy that file to devtargets.rb (which is on the .gitignore list). For example, CakePHP does the same for its database configuration file which naturally changes from machine to machine.

Answer 2

Sure, I do exactly this from time to time using git update-index --assume-unchanged. Works great. Relevant documentation link.