It’s one of those little problems that I’ve been having over and over during my whole career: You have some local changes in your working tree, but you don’t want to commit them in the end. The files should be in version control, so .gitignore is not the solution. You promise yourself to be careful when adding files to the index, but sooner or later muscle memory is coming into play and an innocent git add . happens without you noticing. You work along and in the end you are not attentive when you commit your changes. It happened to me more often than I can count, but only now I wondered if there’s way to locally ignore files. Turns out there is – obviously.
git update-index --assume-unchanged <somefile>To revert this, you can also do the opposite:
git update-index --no-assume-unchangedYou can make it a bit less verbose by defining some aliases in your .gitconfig as well:
ignore = update-index --assume-unchanged
unignore = update-index --no-assume-unchanged
ignored = !git ls-files -v | grep "^[[:lower:]]"That way you can use
git ignore <somefile>to ignore a file and
git unignore <somefile>to unignore it again. To show currently ignored files, you can use
git ignoredIt’s not rocket science, if you know about it. So now I now – and you do to.