Skip file changes tracking in git

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:
-
This one shows all the files you marked with the
--skip-worktreeflag
$ git ls-files -v . | grep ^S
> S config/config.exs
- And that’s how you tell git to remove the flag:
$ git update-index --no-skip-worktree config/config.exs
Happy hacking!
Work with a team that keeps learning and building better software every day.
Related posts
Dive deeper into this topic with these related posts
You might also like
Discover more content from this category
Sometimes you need to do some database operations at once. A simple example: User-A transfers money to User-B. Updating just one balance at the time creates a risk of data desynchronization. What if the first DB operation goes well but updating the second user’s data fails? Sounds like a hard to catch vulnerability.
If you ever had to count occurrences of values in Elixir's list, this short post might be helpful for you!
In some cases, like for testing purposes, you might want to use an npm package stored on a local machine. Here is how you can do that with one simple command.
