How to specify paths in .gitignore?

Question

I am developing a Ruby on Rails application, using git for synchronising code between stakeholders. The application has the ability to send emails. Each stakeholder has his own SMTP provider which is defined in config/initializers/smtp.rb during installation.

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
    address: "smtp.emailme.com",
    port: 587,
    domain: "emailme.com",
    authentication: "plain",
    enable_starttls_auto: true,
    user_name: "me@emailme.com",
    password: "Password"
    }

The .gitignore file is defined as:

*.rbc
capybara-*.html
.rspec
/log
/tmp
/public/system
/coverage/
/spec/tmp
**.orig
rerun.txt
pickle-email-*.html

## Environment normalization:
/.bundle
/vendor/bundle

# these should all be checked in to normalize the environment:
# Gemfile.lock, .ruby-version, .ruby-gemset
Gemfile~

config/initializers/smtp.rb

.gitignore files are identical on Github and on my computer. I tried to specify

config/initializers/smtp.rb

or

/config/initializers/smtp.rb

But whatever, the smtp.rb file on my computer gets overwritten with the file on Github. And it's the same the other way round. What did I miss?

If you want to ignore this file, why does it exist on your GitHub repo? — Oliver Charlesworth, Dec 04 '17 at 14:17
You could remove the file from remote first: https://stackoverflow.com/a/32182171/3450689 — Christoph S, Dec 04 '17 at 14:23
Possible duplicate of [How to make Git "forget" about a file that was tracked but is now in .gitignore?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1274057/how-to-make-git-forget-about-a-file-that-was-tracked-but-is-now-in-gitignore) — Michał Politowski, Dec 04 '17 at 14:49

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 04 '17 at 14:23

As mentioned by @oliver, the file should not exist on git. You can remove the file from git by doing

git rm --cached config/initializers/smtp.rb
git commit -m "Removed config file from repo"
git push

Please do note --cached, it is very important otherwise you can lose the file from you local directory. This option will remove the file only from repo.

See: Remove directory from remote repository after adding them to .gitignore if you want to Add directory to .gitignore

Thanks!

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 04 '17 at 14:26

.gitignore will tell git to ignore changes to files that are not currently being tracked by git.

Run git rm --cached config/initializers/smtp.rb to stop git from tracking future changes to the file.

Create a config/initializers/smtp.template.rb with dummy values, and commit + push your changes.

Direct any new stakeholders to run cp config/initializers/smtp.template.rb config/initializers/smtp.rb and update the file when setting up their development environment.

How to specify paths in .gitignore?

2 Answers2

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