Telling git to ignore symlinks

Question

This question has appeared in similar forms here and here, but they don\'t seem to match up with what I\'m looking for.

I\'m making a project in StaticMatic, a Ruby

Answer 1

Depending on what version of git you are using it should follow symlinks. There's a config setting core.symlinks, that may be set to false and thus not letting git follow them as directories (assuming git >= 1.6). It seems completely reasonable to have your symlinking script also append those links to the .gitignore file or just add them yourself. You could also do something like find . -type l >> .gitignore

Answer 2

We had a similar issue where we needed to ignore a symlinked directory or a real directory, but not a subdirectory of the same name or a file starting with the same letters. For example:

• Ignore - (symlink) ./media
• Ignore - (directory) ./media
• Do not ignore - ./something/media
• Do not ignore - ./media.bak
• Do not ignore - ./media-somethingelse

I ended up using this in the .gitignore:

media
!*/media

Which looks a little strange but is basically saying (line 1) ignore everything "media" but (line 2) do not ignore anything "media" that isn't in the root directory. This method does require a little specificity (in regards to not ignoring things in subdirectories) but should be pretty easy to adapt/extend.

Answer 3

This seems to be a better idea

find . -type l | sed -e s'/^\.\///g' >> .gitignore

Find outputs a "./" prefix for all files. Unless you trim it off, gitignore is unable to act on them . Once you trim the ".\" at the beginning , it works like a charm

Answer 4

My solution might seem silly, but I'd rather do this than update the .gitignore file every time a new file is added.

I merely leave the links with a default name like "link to xxx" and then add the following line to my .gitignore file:

link to *

Then you just ensure you do not name any other files/folders with a name starting with "link to " and you're sorted.

Answer 5

My answer from another question is relevant:

for f in $(git status --porcelain | grep '^??' | sed 's/^?? //'); do
    test -L "$f" && echo $f >> .gitignore;
    test -d "$f" && echo $f\* >> .gitignore;
done

Answer 6

I used the most suitable solution to me - naming agreement.

With files Each symlink to file in my solution had a prefix in a name like "bla.outsidemodule.ts". In .gitignore file, I had just:

**/*.outsidemodule.*

With folders Also on the root of the solution, I had folder "platform", which had common libs/modules for other parts of the solution. The structure was like it:

 - ./platform              <- sources
 - ./client/src/platform   <- symlink to ./platform
 - ./server/src/platform   <- symlink to ./platform
 - ./exchange/src/platform <- symlink to ./platform
 - ./service/src/platform  <- symlink to ./platform

And in .gitignore just:

**/platform <- exclude all "platform" folders
!./platform <- do not exclude folder "platform" if it's on a root