Git ignore issues

How do I excluded a directory from being tracked by Git? My Git ignore entry does not work.

I've got a confusing issue with my Drupal website in which I am using two Git repositories.

The basic structure of the site is : var/www/Intranet/sites/intranet

In the Intranet/sites/intranet is my first Git repository which is where I maintain custom and contributed code using Git to version control.

In order to version control the Drupal core code base, I initiated a new GIT repository at var/www/Intranet. This new repo is meant to track everything except the contents of the sites sub directory. To this end I added sites to the .gitignore file.

But, what I've noticed recently is when I go to var/www/Intranet/sites, it is still being tracked by the new Git repo (var/www/Intranet) which should NOT be the case.

I'm not sure why that is happening.

Solution

(I first misread your question.)

If you have two nested git repos :

Intranet   # <- repo1
+- .git/
+- sites/
 +- intranet  # <- repo2
  +- .git/

from repo1, git will automatically find out that sites/intranet is another repo, and not try to track anything inside it,
from repo2, git will show you the history of repo2, and report any changes for files in repo2

If you run a flat git log from anywhere within the repository, you will see the history of the whole repository.

If you want to check what changes affected a particular file or directory (a path) :
you should run git log [path]

If you run git log sites/ for example (or equivalently : cd sites/; git log .) you should see that nothing has ever been commited in the sites/ directory.

Likewise :

git status will output info about files of the whole repo
git status [path] will restrict its output to files contained in [path]