Local .gitignore

There may be cases where you want to locally ignore a file or directory that is normally tracked by git. An example of this may be built docs. If you add the object to .gitignore, the ignore will be pushed to the remote repo. To ignore a file or directory, add the file/directory to .git/info/exclude with the same syntax as .gitignore.

For example, to ignore the docs/ directory you can do the following:

# echo "docs/" | tee -a .git/info/exclude

If the docs/ directory is already being tracked by git, you will need to update the index to apply the ignore:

# git update-index --assume-unchanged docs/

Now we can test to make sure the ignore works:

# touch docs/test.html
# git status
  On branch master
  Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
   nothing to commit, working tree clean

Success!