CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgithubgitignore
davidmerfield
davidmerfield

Reputation: 89

How to get git to ignore directory on my server?

Let's say my repo looks like this:

myApp public index.html ... tests foo.js ...

I want the tests folder to get pushed to GitHub but NOT to my server. How do I accomplish this?

Since I want tests/ to get pushed to GitHub I cannot simply add /tests/* to my .gitignore file.

I've tried adding /tests/ to the .git/info/exclude file on my server, then deleting the contents of /tests but this did not work.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 132

Answers (2)

marbri91
marbri91

Reputation: 36

As Schwern said if you actually still want to use git for releases the best choice is make another branch for releases. The steps can be:

In your machine:

A-->B-->C-->D          -development
    \       \
     `->v1---`->v2     -releases

Create the releases branch

git branch releases
git checkout releases

You can then remove the test folder in releases branch 

git rm myApp/test
git commit

and merge it with development branch without the folder:

git merge --no-commit development

then you can push the whole project to GitHub. Then in the server you can do:

git pull origin releases

In order to only get the releases branch so you will have this structure in your server.

->v1----->v2      -releases

Upvotes: 2

Schwern
Schwern

Reputation: 164679

.gitignore and .git/info/exclude don't ignore changes. They only say what to consider untracked. Once a file is tracked, they have no effect.

It sounds like you're using Git as a release tool and have run into one of the many problems with that. Version control is a poor release tool. I would suggest instead using a release/packaging system instead.

There can be benefits to using a git checkout in production. For one, if anything is hot patched it will be obvious. But you'll need a release process.

  • Make a release branch off your development branch.
  • Delete the tests directory in the release branch.
  • Checkout the release branch on your production server.

When you're ready to release...

  • git checkout release
  • git merge --no-commit devel
  • Discard the tests directory if it has been readded by the merge.
  • Commit the merge.
  • ssh to production and pull.

Upvotes: 0

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