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I have created a repository in my github account with a socialengine php project without .gitignore file.

Then I clone the repository localyl and I create a .gitignore file and i write some lines of paths to ignore files and folders.
As an example

temporary/log
temporary/session
temporary/package

There is a file auth.php in install/config/auth.php path and I write also in my .gitignore file the path of it to ignore it as follows

install/config

During the installation I see that the subfolders of temporary folder are ignored.

The think is that when I am in the installation step where some authentication lines of code should be written in auth.php file, the file auth.php looks unstaged when I type git status.
I can not figure out why this happens although I have included the path (install/config) in .gitignore file.

I have tried also install/config/, install/config/* but nothing.

If I use git rm --cached install/config/auth.php then the file will be deleted remotely something that must not happen because this file is needed to exist for socialengine installation and for future installation.

There is any idea what I can do for this situation ?

CodeWizard
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apo
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  • Do you want to make local changes to a commited file but you need git to ignore local changes? – CodeWizard Mar 18 '17 at 01:28
  • exactly should be ignored this local change in auth.php file because it has to do with the local installation. File auth.php is not needed to be commited/pushed because other developers on their PCs will have also their local auth.php – apo Mar 18 '17 at 01:35

2 Answers2

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Don't do that!

What you have done here is to assign the responsibility of maintaining the local auth.php file to the source system that uses it.

Consider the following line of thought. Imagine you're the user of the system, which you get from the vendor. Every quarter, the vendor ships you a new system. But you reconfigure whenever you shuffle your servers around, which is every month, or sometimes more or less frequently based on load.

How often should you, as the user, commit your own personal configuration? Well, every time it changes, if you are source-controlling it at all. That's monthly, more or less.

Every three months, the vendor ships you the latest version of the system ... with a new configuration he foists upon you, even though that's not your configuration. That's just wrong. Not only did you not want a new configuration from him, your schedule of configuration changes is not his schedule.

The solution is: as the vendor, don't do that. Don't put the local configuration into the source at all. Your users will have their own local configuration, which they store separately from your code, maybe even in a completely separate repository.

"But my users are stupid! I must foist a configuration upon them!"

Well, that's fine; many are. Go ahead and include an initial configuration, or a default configuration. If your users have not set up their own configuration, use that—maybe even copy it into place as the local configuration. But then, after that, don't touch their local configuration.1 Update the initial and/or default configurations, sure. But don't touch the user's local configuration.

1Except, perhaps, for migrations: if the user is upgrading from version 1.7 to version 2.1, you can migrate their local configuration to add new features. Depending on your configuration file format, you may also need to support reverse migration, should they wish to downgrade from 2.1 back to 1.7.

torek
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  • not understand exactly what you explain. the auth.php file has one line of code with an md5 string and is generated during installation. This happens and must happens for each installation seperately. – apo Mar 18 '17 at 07:55
  • OK, so, it's not really a *configuration*, but it's still something you *generate once*. You do not store it as part of the source! On Unix-like systems, such files should normally be stored in `/var/db` somewhere, e.g., `/var/db/foo/md5` for program `foo`. (In Windows, probably the right place is the Windows registry, though I don't do Windows.) – torek Mar 18 '17 at 08:39
  • its a file auth.php that uses socialengine for the installation. But still have a question why gitignore ignores temporary subfolders and not install/config/auh.php file. Strange for me – apo Mar 18 '17 at 08:56
  • If a file is in the index, it is tracked, and nothing in any ignore file will change that. If a file is *not* in the index, it is untracked. If the file is in a commit, checking out that commit puts it into the index, and hence into the work-tree. If the file is *not* in a commit, but *is* currently in the index, checking out that commit *removes* the file from the index, and hence also from the work-tree. An entry in `.gitignore` does not mean "ignore the file", it means "do not complain about the file's untracked-ness when untracked, and do not auto-add the file with a mass add operation." – torek Mar 18 '17 at 09:25
  • yeah thanks, as ena example the auto-generated files like logs are untracked because there is in gitignore a rule to ignore them but the auth.php is already tracked so a rule on it make no sense. – apo Mar 18 '17 at 09:55
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Local ignore

You need to use the assume-unchanged flag
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-update-index

# To temporarily ignore changes in a certain file, run:
git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

# When you want to track changes again:
git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>

Server side ignore

Read this full answer with a full code to do it on the server side:
What are some more forceful ways than a .gitignore to keep (force) files out of a repo?

--[no-]assume-unchanged

When this flag is specified, the object names recorded for the paths are not updated.

Instead, this option sets/unsets the "assume unchanged" bit for the paths.

When the assume unchanged bit is on, the user promises not to change the file and allows Git to assume that the working tree file matches what is recorded in the index. If you want to change the working tree file, you need to unset the bit to tell Git. This is sometimes helpful when working with a big project on a filesystem that has very slow lstat(2) system call (e.g. cifs).

Git will fail (gracefully) in case it needs to modify this file in the index e.g. when merging in a commit; thus, in case the assumed-untracked file is changed upstream, you will need to handle the situation manually.

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Community
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CodeWizard
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  • For my understanding this is a local solution. Each developer can use this to ignore the auth.php file. My thought is why git can not ignore it directly from .gitignore. May windows be a part of the problem... – apo Mar 18 '17 at 01:46
  • You can do it with git hook on the server side to "ignore" the file when its commited. – CodeWizard Mar 18 '17 at 01:52