Is there a way to “freeze” a file in Git?

Question

I\'m in a situation where I want to open source my project, however there\'s a single source file that I want to release a \"clean\" version of, but use a separate version l

Answer 1

use update-index, here are the docs.

Here is a basic example freezing a file foo.rb:

git update-index --assume-unchanged foo.rb

Then, to get it back:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged foo.rb

Or for simplicity, add it to .gitconfig

freeze = update-index --assume-unchanged
thaw = update-index --no-assume-unchanged
...
git freeze foo.rb
git thaw foo.rb

Note: This answer was originally provided by @TheAmpersand in comments above. I thought it was important enough to formalize.