Is it possible to initialize a new git repository inside a non-empty directory and track only files/folders newly added after initializing while ignoring the old ones. For example:
Current folder structure before initializing a new repo:
FolderA/
FolderB/
file1.php
file2.php
After initializing a new repo and creating new files and direcotries:
FolderA/ // old, ignore
FolderB/ // old, ignore
FolderC/ // new, track
file1.php // old, ignore
file2.php // old, ignore
file3.php // new, track
Git will only ever track files that you explicitly tell it to using git add. Therefore, there is nothing you need to do: just don't tell Git to track the files you don't want it to track.
This can get annoying if you look at git status, which will then list all untracked files.
There is an easy solution for that, too: just ignore all files:
echo '*' > .gitignore
This will tell Git to ignore all files. You can still add individual files to the repository using git add -f (the -f is necessary to force Git to ignore the fact that the files are ignored).
If you want to use git add . or git add somedirectory to add all new files, then you need to individually list all the files to be ignored in .gitignore. You can use the "annoying" fact I described above, namely that git status will list all untracked files:
git status --porcelain -uall | grep -E '^\?\? ' | cut -d ' ' -f2- > .gitignore
--porcelain specifies the output format for git status to be "Porcelain v1" format. The Porcelain output formats are guaranteed to never change and are designed to be easy to parse by machines, unlike the short or long output formats which are designed to be human-readable and thus may get changed to make them easier to read. -uall tell git status to list all untracked files, otherwise it will only list the directory name if all files in a directory are untracked.
The grep looks for lines beginning with ?? which is how untracked files are listed. The cut then cuts out everything after the ??, which is the file name.
Note: this will break with a file named abc\n?? def.txt, for example. If you have such files, you need to harden the command by e.g. using the -z flag to git status which prints the records delimited by ASCII NUL instead of a newline.
If you have only small number of files to ignored by git, You can use gitignore functionality of git.
To create a simple gitignore follow the steps:
.gitignoreList all the files you want to be ignored by git, with name of each file on each seperate line. eg.
FolderA FolderB file1.php file2.php
For more complex gitignore refer:
You can also use tools such as https://www.gitignore.io/ to generate a gitignore file for you.
Hope this helps.
git init itself can not do that, at least not to my knowledge. But a little shell magic can do the trick:
cd /path/to/directory/
touch .gitignore # creates file .gitignore if not yet existing
for file in *; do
echo $file >> .gitignore
done # appends all the filenames of files in directory to file .gitignore
git init # inits the repository
After the repo has been initialized, you still need to add files (including .gitignore) before committing.
I ended up with excluding all files/folders and included only specific ones. Here is what I did:
.gitignore file within the directory root and added * to untrack all the files and folders.gitignore by adding specific files and folders to be tracked from this point onwardsMy final .gitignore now uses this pattern:
# Ignore everything
*
# Include folders
!/folderC
!/folderD
# Include files
!file3.php
!file4.php
# Include files containing
!*foo*
This workaround seems to be working fine for now. Thanks to Jörg W Mittag and Michael H. answers i was pointed to the right direction.
There were also some useful resources from other SO users:
Make .gitignore ignore everything except a few files
How do I tell Git to ignore everything except a subdirectory?