How to force git to completely forget about a file that is present in gitignore folder

Question

Hi Team,

I have one file in the .gitignore list. However, that file keeps showing up in git status after it's edited. How do you force git to completely forget about it?

Answer 1

Hi@akhtar,

gitignore file is a text file that tells Git which files or folders to ignore in a project. A local . gitignore file is usually placed in the root directory of a project. You can also create a global . gitignore file and any entries in that file will be ignored in all of your Git repositories.

To stop tracking a file you need to remove it from the index. This can be achieved with this command.

$ git rm --cached <file>

If you want to remove a whole folder, you need to remove all files in it recursively.

$ git rm -r --cached <folder>