CODEWITHSUNDEEP
git
Alex
Alex

Reputation: 1391

prevent git from tracking symlink to folder

The dir structure of my project looks like this:

/home
----- data -> /path/to/another/folder
----- .git/
----- .gitignore
----- folder1
----- folder2

The .gitignore file contains:

/home/data

data (a link to another folder) currently appears as an untracked file. I thought by adding it to .gitignore I could get git to stop following it altogether but it doesn't seem to be working as expected. How do I get data to stop showing up in untracked files?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 233

Answers (1)

Schwern
Schwern

Reputation: 165576

The .gitignore file contains:

/home/data

Entries in .gitignore are relative to the repository, not absolute locations on your disk. It doesn't matter to Git where the repository is stored. From Git's perspective, the structure of your project is this.

/
    data -> /path/to/another/folder
    .gitignore
    folder1
    folder2

So you want to tell Git to ignore /data.

The leading slash says to only ignore data at the top of the repository. folder1/data will not be ignored.

The lack of a trailing slash is important. If there was a trailing slash git would look for a directory, not a symlink to a directory.

Upvotes: 4

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