Clean up untracked files in git repository based on .gitignore

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The other day I had created a new React Native module project and pushed it to the git repository. Then later, I added the file .gitignore. Since we added it later, these files will still exist in our repository index. How can we clean them up?

1. Commit all your local changes including .gitignore
   git commit -am "file changes"

2. Remove everything from the repository
   git rm -r --cached .
# --cached will only remove files from the index.
   . Indicates all files will be untracked
   or
   you can un-track individual files
   git rm --cached ios/Pods

3. Re-add everything
   git add --all

4. Commit the files
   git commit -m "cleanup .gitignore files"