Can I 'git commit' a file and ignore its content changes?

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Every developer on my team has their own local configuration. That configuration information is stored in a file called devtargets.rb which is used in our rake build tasks. I don't want developers to clobber each other's devtargets file, though.

My first thought was to put that file in the .gitignore list so that it is not committed to git.

Then I started wondering: is it possible to commit the file, but ignore changes to the file? So, I would commit a default version of the file and then when a developer changes it on their local machine, git would ignore the changes and it wouldn't show up in the list of changed files when you do a git status or git commit.

Is that possible? It would certainly be a nice feature...

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5 Answers

It is not possible to ignore changes to a tracked file with Git. The Git FAQ explains this:

Git doesn’t provide a way to do this. The reason is that if Git needs to overwrite this file, such as during a checkout, it doesn’t know whether the changes to the file are precious and should be kept, or whether they are irrelevant and can safely be destroyed. Therefore, it has to take the safe route and always preserve them.

It’s tempting to try to use certain features of git update-index, namely the assume-unchanged and skip-worktree bits, but these don’t work properly for this purpose and shouldn’t be used this way.

If your goal is to work with a configuration file, then the best thing to do is add an example or template file and then either have the user copy it into place or have a script create the appropriate file. You should then ignore the location of the actual configuration file and only check in the example or the template.

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