Category Archives: Git

Git: Ignore changes to already-tracked files

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There are often times when you want to modify a file but not commit the changes, for example changing the database configuration to run on your local machine.

Adding the file to .gitignore doesn’t work, because the file is already tracked. Luckily, Git will allow you to manually “ignore” changes to a file or directory:

git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

And if you want to start tracking changes again, you can undo the previous command using:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>

Easy!

Converting an SVN repository to Git

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Today I found out just how easy it is to convert an SVN repository to Git without losing any commit history. Note that you will need git-svn (apt-get install git-svn on Debian/Ubuntu).

git svn clone http://mysvnrepo.com/my-project my-project
cd my-project
git remote add origin git@mygitrepo.com:/my-project.git
git push origin master

Et voilà, my-project.git has the full commit history of the my-project SVN repository.

If anybody knows whether SVN branches can be converted to Git branches, please get in touch!

Useful Git Configuration Items

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Name and email address

Each commit you make has your name and email address attached to it. Git will automatically configure these based on your username and hostname, but this information is usually not a good identifier. It is a good idea to set your real name and email address so that your commits can be identified easily.

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.com

Global ignore file

Often there are files or directories that you want to ignore in all your Git projects. These are probably created automatically by your IDE, or ‘junk’ files created by the operating system. Here’s a sample global ignore file (I use PhpStorm, which creates an .idea directory in the root of each project): Continue reading →