.gitignore is not ignoring directories

Question

What I did:

I think there were some weird configurations from the github gui that caused this issue and prevented me from being able to easily use git from command line or even git-bash.

I ended up just uninstalling github and git then reinstalling just git for windows. I now have everything running off the command line(except ssh which I run from git-bash). Much easier and more reliable that the github gui.

Thanks to mu 無 for taking the time to try to figure this out. I didn't end up using his answer, but if I hadn't needed to do a reinstall of git it would have been what I needed to do.

---

I am using the github gui on my local machine. I just noticed that a commit I was about to make was going to update all of my recently update node modules. I set up my .gitignore to ignore the entire node_modules/ directory.

I'm not sure what to do about this. All the file types I included in .gitignore were ignored. It's just the directories that it seems to ignore.

Here is my .gitignore file:

#################
## Sublime Text
#################

*.sublime-project
*.sublime-workspace

#################
## Images
#################

*.jpg
*.jpeg
*.png
*.gif
*.psd
*.ai

#################
## Windows detritus
#################

# Windows image file caches
Thumbs.db
ehthumbs.db

# Folder config file
Desktop.ini

# Recycle Bin used on file shares
$RECYCLE.BIN/

# Mac crap
.DS_Store

#################
## Directories
#################

dev/
cms/core/config/
node_modules/

Answer 1

Since the node_modules directory is already tracked as part of the repository, the .gitignore rule will not apply to it.

You need to untrack the directory from git using

git rm -r --cached node_modules
git commit -m "removing node_modules"

You can run the above 2 in git-bash.

After this, the .gitignore rule will ignore the directory away.

Note that this will remove the directory node_modules from your other repos once you pull the changes in. Only the original repo where you made that commit will still have the node_modules folder there.

Answer 2

Similar to Zach, I also used echo "node_modules/" >> .gitignore.

The problem was it had created the file with encoding UCS-2 LE BOM. Using notepad++ I changed the encoding to UTF-8 and voila - node_modules is now ignored.

Answer 3

If you work with node projects, I like this .gitignore:

# See http://help.github.com/ignore-files/ for more about ignoring files.

# dependencies
node_modules

# testing
coverage

# production
build

# misc
.DS_Store
.env
npm-debug.log

Answer 4

I had this problem. Somehow when I generated the file (using echo "node_modules" > .gitignore) it had inserted a garbage character at the beginning of the file (I blame powershell).

So, if you run into this problem try deleting your .gitignore and starting over.

Answer 5

If the files are already tracked the .gitignore file will not override this. You will need to use git rm --cached <files>

See the full details on git rm at https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-rm.html I ran into this once or twice myself early on with git and it was not quite what I expected either.

Answer 6

If you do:

git rm -r --cached node_modules
git commit -m "removing node_modules"

Do you need to reinstall the npm packages? I have a .gitignore file with code to ignore node_modules in my repository, but it isn't ignoring them. I am new to coding!