Excluding files in etckeeper with .gitignore doesn't work

Question

I use etckeeper for changes in my configfiles (on Debian squeeze)

Since I also have an ircdeamon running, there are some files, that change every minute in the folder

/etc/hybserv/

I don't want to version control them anymore, so I added

hybserv/*

to the end of

/etc/.gitignore

but they are not ignored! They keep showing up every hour in the hourly commit.

What am I doing wrong?

score 17 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 04 '13 at 08:28

You need to delete (=unregister) them from git.

Use something like

cd /etc
git rm --cached hybserv/*
git commit -m "Remove hybserv/* files from git"

Note the --cached option. With it, the files are only removed from git and are not deleted from the disk.

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