git ignoring .gitattributes pattern

Question

I've a directory structure like this:

root/
  .git
  deploy/
  Site/
    blah/
    more_blah/
      something.local
      else.development
    Rakefile
    .gitattributes

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Edit: to further clarify the above, directories have a trailing / and children are indented beneath a directory, so blah and more_blah are directories but Rakefile and .gitattributes are files, but all four are children of Site.

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I'm running git-archive from the Site directory like so:

git archive --format=tar --prefix=git-v0.0.1/ v0.0.1 | gzip > ../deploy/git-v0.0.1.tar.zip

but whatever pattern I put in .gitattributes, the resulting archive always contains Rakefile. I've tried:

• Rakefile
• Site/Rakefile
• */Rakefile
• ./Rakefile
• Rakefile*
• *

None of them work as I'd expect. Is anyone willing to point out the obvious yet non-obvious to me solution? Any help is much appreciated.

---

My apologies for not being clear.

• I said the pattern I was using didn't seem to work, but I am using "export-ignore" after the pattern.
• Rakefile is not a directory, just a file
• The .gitattributes file is successful in removing other patterns from the archive, Rakefile is not the only pattern used, but is the only one that doesn't work. It doesn't work whether I have it on its own or with other patterns, and at any place in the file. This is not true, due to having renamed certain files but not archiving the commit with the rename I was appearing to get some good results. My bad! :S

This is my .gitattributes (sitting in the directory Site)

Rakefile        export-ignore
*.local         export-ignore
*.development   export-ignore
*.staging       export-ignore

Answer 1

Not sure this is common case but I had trouble excluding folder tests from source tree which have many nested levels of folders. If I wrote only this line to .gitattributes

tests/* export-ignore

It didnt work and entire directory was remain in archive. The solution was to add wildcards for all subdirs levels:

tests/* export-ignore
tests/*/* export-ignore
tests/*/*/* export-ignore
tests/*/*/*/* export-ignore
tests/*/*/*/*/* export-ignore

With these lines the tests directory finally disappeared from archive.

Answer 2

I believe @Jefromi gave the information needed for me to resolve this with his comments, but is too humble to take the credit, and I'd like to keep my acceptance rating at 100% (quite rightly) so I'll give the answer here:

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Ok, two things were needed. --worktree-attributes on its own did not work, but when I moved the .gitattributes file into the root dir from the Site dir, then it worked. Again, the Git book implies that the file doesn't need to be in the root for it to work "... (normally the root of your project)", so I feel a bit let down by those docs (for once). I also think it's not-what-you'd-think behaviour to have to opt in the file when .gitignore just works, IMO.

Answer 3

For directories I had problems with different versions of git, so I had to include an entry both with and without a training slash:

• foo/bar export-ignore
• foo/bar/ export-ignore

Where foo/bar is relative to the where I ran git archive, but the actual .gitattributes was in the project root directory in addition to --worktree-attributes as noted above.

Answer 4

Note: to ignore a directory, you needs to have a '/' at the end of said directory.

Rakefile/

For archive, like Arrowmaster mentions in his answer, and like the Pro Git book details, you need the export-ignore option:

Rakefile/ export-ignore

Answer 5

With git version 1.7.2.5, which is the default on debian squeeze (hence this post), there must not be a slash at the end to ignore a directory. So in order to ignore the deploy dir in the above question the following line must be used (no slash):

deploy        export-ignore

This is in contradiction to the documentation (man gitattributes / man gitignore) and the git book. The documentation of gitattributes references gitignore. Interestingly dirs with a slash (deploy/) work in a .gitignore file.

I did not test later versions of git.

Answer 6

Are you trying to have the files included in the repository but not in the archive created from git archive? If so the syntax of your .gitattributes files wrong. If not then .gitattributes is not what you should be using.

To have files excluded from the archive produced by git archive you should put the following into the .gitattrubutes.

Rakefile export-ignore