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gitgitignore

Can I add a .gitignore file just for me that overrides the project .gitignore?

I am using Git in Android Studio on a OS X machine, and I would like to have a personal .gitignore file that overrides the .gitignore that are in the project (I want mine to ignore .iml files). Can this be done and how?

I have tried to create a .gitignore file in my home dir with the following lines in:

# Android Studio
.*.iml
*.iml

And the I have used this command to make git use my file git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore, but it does not work.

Any ideas?

Solution

  • Instead of creating a new .gitignore file, you should use the .git/info/exclude file to setup ignore rules specific to your clone of the repo.

    So, basically, go to your project root, and run

    cd $PROJECT_ROOT
echo "*.iml" >> .git/info/exclude

    Note that the the pattern *.iml will take care of files of kind .*.iml as well, so you can make do with one ignore rule.

    Also, this complements the existing ignore rules in .gitignore and ignore rules of .gitignore will still be applied.

    It seems you are already tracking the .iml files in your Git repo, so you can try removing them from Git using

    git rm -r *.iml
git commit -m "removed *.iml"

    Note that this will untrack them from the master repository as well once you do a push.

    Otherwise, you can use git update-index --assume-unchanged <filename> to ignore changes to those files locally. And afterwards, the gitignore rules should work all right.