How do I correctly add a visual studios project to a Git repository

Question

I have already committed my whole Visual Studios project to my Git repository. However, I realized that I didn't include a gitignore file until after I committed my project. I think this is causing problems since I've pushed some of the files that are compiled. My main problem is that my gitignore is not ignoring files such as .dll and .pdb .

How can I fix this? Should I remove my whole project and recommit with the new gitignore ? or are there specific visual studios folders I can just remove?

Answer 1

.gitignore ignores only those files which are not being already tracked with git. Since you already added the .dll files, they won't be ignored on their own now.

You can remove specific folders/files from your repo using git rm

git rm -r --cached folder_1
git rm -r --cached folder_2
git rm --cached file_1
git commit -m "removing unwanted files"

The -r above is for recursive removal of folders.

However, that will leave a commit history having all those files.

So, if you haven't pushed it upstream already, and have made fairly low number of commits till now, I would recommend creating a new repo - Delete the .git folder, and then run git init , then create/update the .gitignore file with the right entries, and finally add your code again.