Do you also suffer from the fact that when you change your .gitignore file it does not affect already tracked files? Well, here I will show you how to solve that!
How I fixed my .gitignore is being ignored issue
Stupid mistake. Easy fix. After I updated the .gitignore file so that it excluded the builds folder, I saw that changes to the build folder were still part of my commits. Apparently, files already tracked previously stay in the repository. Fortunately, there is a trick to tell git to reset the tracked files.
This is what I did to reset my tracked files
First of all, I have updated my .gitignore file so that my builds folder was excluded. After that, I entered the commands below in a terminal window. Make sure you are already inside your project folder!
The steps consist of first removing all files from being tracked without altering them. Next, I add them again and finally commit them again. That’s it!
git rm -r --cached .
git add .
git commit -m ".gitignore fix"