Adding .gitignore and removing files that should have been ignored

Question

I followed this link https://help.github.com/articles/adding-an-existing-project-to-github-using-the-command-line/ to push my project to a repo. I noticed that I don't have a gitignore file and that files such as .idea and .iml have been added to the repo. How do I add a gitignore file and delete these from the repo?

Answer 1

You need to add .gitignore file to your project root directory

Get .gitignore file for android from Android.gitignore It contains all possible ignore files which should be ignored from android project

Then follow these git commands to remove files from git repository. Local files will not be deleted

 git rm --cached .idea
 git rm --cached project.iml
 git rm --cached <file_name>

Remove all the files you want to ignore Then add the changes and commit it using following commands

 git add .
 git commit -m "ignoreable files ignored"

Then if you want to push those changes to remote just use

git push origin master

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Edit 1

In case your remote branch has new commits and updated by other contributor you need to fetch it and rebase it before pushing

git fetch origin master
git rebase origin/master
git push origin master

So it will be synced with local branch

Answer 2

You need to add a .gitignore file at the root of your git repository. In that, you can put as a new-line separated list, the regular expressions of the paths you want git to ignore while looking for changes in your repository.

So for example, your git repo root directory has the following sub directories that you want git to ignore,

{git-root}/project/bin/debug {git-root}/project/bin/release

You can simply add {git-root}/project/bin/ in your .gitignore if these two directories are the only ones in your {git-root}/project/bin sub-directory.

Similarly, if in your {git-root}/project/bin sub directory, you have another directory tests and you do not want to ignore that, then you will have to add
{git-root}/project/bin/debug
{git-root}/project/bin/release

to your .gitignore file.

For an example, this is the .gitignore file of an android project I am working on. You can observe the syntax:

{project}/app/release/
{project}/app/debug/
{project}/api_objects/
{project}/.idea/caches/
{project}/api/
{project}/.idea/vcs.xml
{project}/.idea/inspectionProfiles/Project_Default.xml

After this, don't forget to add the .gitignore to your git repo using git add .gitignore . You can do all this manually or through any of the Git desktop clients like Sourcetree or Git Desktop . It is easier to do this using the UI tools I listed.