We are trying to set up a new staging server and are attempting a git clone. We would like to one-time pull files from our .gitignore (data files which should exist but don't need to be current). Is there a way to ignore .gitignore just this once?
You can just have the files on default state on remote repository, remove the files from .gitignore, and ignore changes that will be made on already-tracked files locally using:
git update-index --skip-worktree [filepath]
Every collaborators of your project should ideally do this so they can modify the files locally without affecting the ones on remote repository.