Retrofitting .gitignore

I recently embarked on a green field application and in my haste to get things up and running I forgot to add a .gitignore to my solution. Not a big issue, until you factor in that I only realised this about a dozen commits in!

Thankfully, this was a fairly simple thing to fix and for those in the same boat; here's how I went about it...

Step 1

First of all, add your .gitignore to your solution and commit it.

Step 2

Next, remove everything from the repo (don't panic, your files won't be deleted!) by using the bash command git rm -r --cached .

• rm is the remove command
• -r will allow recursive removal
• --cached will only remove files from the index and won't delete your files.
• the . at the end means that all files will be untracked. If you want to untrack a specific file, use the command git rm --cached filename.txt.

Step 3

Once you've removed and untracked your files, you can now add your files with git add . then re-commit everything with your .gitignore git commit -m "added .gitignore" and push.

And thats it, you will now have a clean repo 👍

Cover image from Yancy Min on Unsplash