Quite often, you want to change a file temporarily whilst you work on something, but you know you don’t want to commit it. Right now I want to change my project’s logging from INFO to DEBUG, but I don’t want to commit that.
There’s a command git update-index which has a flag --assume-unchanged. And it just makes those files ignored for a while.
$ git status # On branch master # Changed but not updated: # (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed) # (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory) # # modified: src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml # no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a") $ git update-index --assume-unchanged src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml $ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory clean)
Easy! Now, edit away.
… time passes …
And now to get everything back to normal.
$ git update-index --verbose --really-refresh src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml: needs update $ git status # On branch master # Changed but not updated: # (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed) # (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory) # # modified: src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml # no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
I have to be honest, this is slightly hacky. It would be nice to be able to tell git “ignore this change,” in the way you can say “add this change”. But it works OK for now.
Jabbering Giraffe 
2 replies on “temporarily ignoring files in git”
You don’t actually commit changed files unless you do commit -a or add them explicitly; why the need to further hide changes?
@Leonardo Just because it gets in the way of “git diff” and so on. Plus, I want to make sure that I don’t commit them by accident, which I still find easy to do.