Ignore a file in git without adding to .gitignore

Thu Dec 09 2021

A small thing that I do so rarely and always forget how to do when I start a new project is how to ignore any files that are specific to your local setup.

This can sometimes be necessary for example if you are working on a repo that you do not control and you do not want to add to the .gitignore file and push that to the repo. In my case, I was using WebStorm as my IDE that has an .idea file, which contains project configuration data, and I want git to ignore it.

One option is to add the filename to the exclude file.

vi .git/info/exclude

This is what I see when I initially opened .git/info/exclude in my current project.

# git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~

Add .idea in this file and it will be ignored by git.

# git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~
.idea

Atlassian describe them as Personal Git ignore rules and define it far better than I can.

You can also define personal ignore patterns for a particular repository in a special file at .git/info/exclude. These are not versioned, and not distributed with your repository, so it’s an appropriate place to include patterns that will likely only benefit you. For example if you have a custom logging setup, or special development tools that produce files in your repository’s working directory, you could consider adding them to .git/info/exclude to prevent them from being accidentally committed to your repository.
Atlassian