git to ignore a hidden directory in the local repo

Question

I just initialised a project directory to be a git local repo by doing git init

But ls -la shows that there is a hidden directory ".idea" which I think I don't need to track with my project. If that is correct, I tried to add it to my .gitignore buy just appending a ".idea/*" at the end of that file.

git status still shows the .idea/ listed.

Reading other posts on SO did not help me much since they are trying to stop tracking files which are already being tracked, or on the remote repo.
I am trying to start a fresh and ignore .idea/ from the very beginning and on the local repo before pushing anything to the remote repo. Thanks

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6535362/gitignore-after-commit — learnvst, Jan 27 '16 at 00:19
You didn't exclude `.idea`, just all the files in it. Use `.idea` instead in the `.gitignore` file. That, at least, works for me, ignoring the directory and all the files therein. — Jonathan Leffler, Jan 27 '16 at 00:25
@learnvst the question fred-j asked is not the same as the one you linked — number5, Jan 27 '16 at 00:28

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

2

You can use git rm to remove the file in .idea folder from being tracked. What I usually do for my projects with Intellij IDEA, is like this :

git rm -r --cached .idea/

then

git add .
git commit -m "Excluded .idea from being tracked"
git push

From this moment on, the git won't track the idea folder any more.

You can also take a look at the answers for this question.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

Community

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answered Jan 27 '16 at 05:28

Farhad

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(future / other readers) The "git add ." was a little weird for me. But this answer got that pesky .idea/ folder removed that someone checked in. Thanks. – granadaCoder Oct 08 '20 at 20:37

git to ignore a hidden directory in the local repo

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