Why doesn't Git ignore my specified file?

Please use this command

git rm -rf --cached .
git add .

Sometimes .gitignore files don't work even though they're correct. The reason Git ignores files is that they are not added to the repository. If you added a file that you want to ignore before, it will be tracked by Git, and any skipping matching rules will be skipped. Git does this because the file is already part of the repository.

I had the same problem.
Files defined in .gitingore where listed as untracked files when running git status.

This was because the .gitignore file was saved in UTF-16LE encoding, and not in UTF8 encoding.

After changing the encoding of the .gitignore file to UTF8 it worked.

What I did it to ignore the settings.php file successfully:

1. git rm --cached sites/default/settings.php
2. commit (up to here didn't work)
3. manually deleted sites/default/settings.php (this did the trick)
4. git add .
5. commit (ignored successfully)

I think if there's the committed file on Git then ignore doesn't work as expected. Just delete the file and commit. Afterwards it'll ignore.

There are instances e.g. Application Configuration files, which I want tracked in git (so .gitignore will not work), but that I need to change for local settings. I do not want git to manage these files or show them as modified. To do this I use skip-worktree:

git update-index --skip-worktree path/to/file

You can confirm files are skipped by listing files and checking for lines starting with S for skipped

git ls-files -v | grep ^S

If in the future you want to have git manage the file locally again simply run:

 git update-index --no-skip-worktree path/to/file

Mescalito above had a great answer, that led me down the right track but

git update-index --assume-unchanged file/to/ignore.php

Has a contract with git that in which : the user promises not to change the file and allows Git to assume that the working tree file matches what is recorded in the index.

However, I change the content of the files, so in my case --skip-worktree is the better option.

Toshiharu Nishina's website provided an excellent explanation of skip-worktree vs assume-unchanged: Ignore files already managed with Git locally

Another possible reason – a few instances of git clients running at the same time. For example "git shell" + "GitHub Desktop", etc.

This happened to me, I was using "GitHub Desktop" as the main client and it was ignoring some new .gitignore settings: commit after commit:

1. You commit something.
2. Next, commit: it ignores .gitignore settings. Commit includes lots of temp files mentioned in the .gitignore.
3. Clear git cache; check whether .gitignore is UTF8; remove files -> commit -> move files back; skip 1 commit – nothing helped.

Reason: the Visual Studio Code editor was running in the background with the same opened repository. VS Code has built-in git control, and this makes some conflicts.

Solution: double-check multiple, hidden git clients and use only one git client at once, especially while clearing git cache.

Make sure the .gitignore does not have a extension!! It can't be .gitignore.txt, in windows just name the file .gitignore. and it will work.

I tried most commands above on VS Code terminal and I got errors like:

fatal: pathspec '[dir]/[file]' did not match any files

I opened the project on GitHub Desktop and ignored from there and it worked.

One thing that I think has been missed in the excellent answers here is the existence of another .gitignore or multiple of them.

In a case, I had cloned a repo and could not figure out why a "ignored" file was being added again when running git add. It worked out that there was another .gitignore in a subfolder and that was overriding the one in the root folder.

/.gitignore
/some-folder/.gitignore
/some-folder/this-file-keeps-getting-staged

The

root /.gitignore

was ignoring this-file-keeps-getting-staged

The

/some-folder/.gitignore

did not have a specification to ignore "this-file-keeps-getting-staged" file.

And hence the issue.

One of the things is to simply search for multiple .gitignore files in the hierarchy. And figure out the rules as they apply.

One tricky problem is that If you do something like echo node_modules >> .gitignore, it won't work. The windows terminal saves the file in UCS-2 LE BOM and git doesn't seem to accept that.

You can open the file with Notepad and save it with UTF-8 encoding

It Works now.

I think they need to fix this since echo "filetoignore" >> .gitignore actually seems a handy thing to do