git - Apply .gitignore on an existing repository already tracking large number of files

Question

I have an existing Visual Studio project in my repository. I recently added a .gitignore file under my project and I assume that tells Git to ignore the files listed in the file.

My problem is that all those files are already being tracked and as far as I know Git will not ignore a file that was already tracked before a rule was added to this file to ignore it.

It was suggested to use: git rm --cached and manually un-track them but that's going to take me forever to go through them one by one.

I thought about deleting the repository and recreating it again but this time with .gitignore file present, but there must be a better way to do this.

Answer 1

This answer solved my problem:

First of all, commit all pending changes.

Then run this command:

git rm -r --cached .

This removes everything from the index, then just run:

git add .

Commit it:

git commit -m ".gitignore is now working"