Excluding files from localgit repo

Question

I am working on a Wordpress site, and been given access to the git repository for this project. The entire WP install is in the Repo. All I care about is being able to push my changes to the theme and a select list of plugin folders, ie:

/wp-content/themes/myTheme2017/
/wp-content/plugins/myPlugin1/
/wp-content/plugins/myPlugin2/
....

How can I exclude everything else from being tracked? How can I update my local WP install, and customize my wp-config.php file, and not have those changes be tracked?

As per How do I configure git to ignore some files locally?, I can specify the files I want excluded much like in gitignore files. Then, I can run git update-index --skip-worktree [<file>...] and get my desired results.

git update-index --skip-worktree wp-config.php

The real question is then can I exclude entire folders? Do I have to run the skip-worktree command on every file?

Have you tried looking at this question? >> [.gitignore exclude folder but include specific subfolder](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5533050/gitignore-exclude-folder-but-include-specific-subfolder) — Chawarong Songserm PMP, Sep 28 '17 at 02:40
I can't use gitinore because the files and directories are in the repository. I need to use exclude somehow, but I'm not finding much info on it. Re: https://help.github.com/articles/ignoring-files/ — Jeff Wilkerson, Sep 28 '17 at 02:47
oic. looks to me that you need to separate your code out of the main repo by using git submodule. — Chawarong Songserm PMP, Sep 28 '17 at 03:17
@chawarong can you give more details? thank you for your time — Jeff Wilkerson, Sep 28 '17 at 03:36
@VonC has already answered that. I also find this link helpful. [Working with submodules](https://github.com/blog/2104-working-with-submodules) — Chawarong Songserm PMP, Sep 28 '17 at 07:06

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 28 '17 at 04:55

The real question is then can I exclude entire folders? Do I have to run the skip-worktree command on every file?

Yes, every file: Git does work with content (files), not containers (directories).

You can find here an approach using submodules

git submodule add -f https://github.com/wp-plugins/wp-migrate-db.git ./wp-content/plugins/wp-migrate-db
git commit -m "Added WP Migrate DB plugin"

That allows to commit separately in your parent repo or your submodule.

Excluding files from localgit repo

1 Answers1