I have an existing Visual Studio project in my repository. I recently added a .gitignore file under my project and I assume that tells Git to ignore the files listed in the file.
My problem is that all those files are already being tracked and as far as I know Git will not ignore a file that was already tracked before a rule was added to this file to ignore it.
It was suggested to use: git rm --cached and manually un-track them but that's going to take me forever to go through them one by one.
I thought about deleting the repository and recreating it again but this time with .gitignore file present, but there must be a better way to do this.
This answer solved my problem:
First of all, commit all pending changes.
Then run this command:
git rm -r --cached .
This removes everything from the index, then just run:
git add .
Commit it:
git commit -m ".gitignore is now working"
Please be careful, when you push this to a repository and pull from somewhere else into a state where those files are still tracked, the files will be DELETED