Exclude Files from Git

Excluding files from your Git repository is normally done by adding them to the .gitignore file. However, sometimes you want to exclude files without touching .gitignore (for example, if you have some local configuration files or scripts that you don’t want to commit but don’t want to—or can’t—add to the official project ignore file either).

You can ignore local changes to tracked files by using the git update-index command with the --assume-unchanged option. But some files you don’t want to add to the repository at all.

These files you can add to the .git/info/exclude file. It is not tracked by Git, so it won’t be included in your repository, but things added there will be ignored by Git just the same.

I do this quite often (for example, I have a local justfile with my own scripts that should not be committed), so I wrote the following shell script to help with the task.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# git-exclude
# Exclude file pattern locally (without touching .gitignore)

set -e  # exit on non-zero exit status
set -u  # error on unset variables or parameters
set -o pipefail  # set pipeline return value to last non-zero status

GIT_ROOT=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
EXCLUDE_FILE="$GIT_ROOT/.git/info/exclude"

if [[ ! -f "$EXCLUDE_FILE" ]]; then
  touch "$EXCLUDE_FILE"
fi

if [[ -n ${1:-} ]]; then
    if grep --quiet "^$1$" "$EXCLUDE_FILE"; then
        echo "Already excluded: $1"
    else
      echo "$1" >> "$EXCLUDE_FILE"
    fi
else
    echo "Usage: git exclude <pattern>" >&2
    exit 1
fi

If you save this file as git-exclude somewhere in your path, you can then use it as a Git “add-on” to exclude files locally.

# tell Git to ignore 'justfile'
git exclude justfile

If the exclude file doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically. And the script only adds new patterns to the file (avoids duplicates).

I mostly add individual files to the list, but you can use the same file matching patterns as you would with .gitignore.

If you want a more thorough explanation of the different ignore files, Marijke Luttekes has a good post on the subject.