Skip file changes tracking in git
Join Elixir newsletter
Subscribe to receive Elixir news to your inbox every two weeks.
So, you’re changing this one file for local development purposes only. Maybe it’s config, maybe some source file, but one thing is certain - you don’t want those changes to be committed. And what’s worse, .gitignore doesn’t work.
Yeah, .gitignore works only for files not tracked by git yet. So if there’s a config.ex file, which is a part of the project, and you don’t want to rebuild the repo from the foundation (which is rather a bad idea), then you probably want to reach for this one simple trick:
$ git update-index --skip-worktree config/config.exs
From git docs:
Skip-worktree bit can be defined in one (long) sentence: Tell git to avoid writing the file to the working directory when reasonably possible, and treat the file as unchanged when it is not present in the working directory.
Neither git status, git add . nor your IDE source control visualization should bother you anymore.
Ahh, and remember two more commands if you don’t want to google them later madly:
$ git ls-files -v . | grep ^S
> S config/config.exs
$ git update-index --no-skip-worktree config/config.exs
Happy hacking!
Related posts
Dive deeper into this topic with these related posts
You might also like
Discover more content from this category
In the world of Elixir programming, there are numerous features and syntactic constructs that contribute to the language's elegance and expressiveness. One such hidden gem is the concept of "implicit try".