How to remove files that are in .gitignore but still in the git repository
Removing those pesky files that I forgot to remove from the repository but are already in GitHub.
January 27, 2021 •
Code 💻
1 min read
There are numerous times where we either forgot to remove some unnecessary files but are commited and pushed to master branch in GitHub. In these situation, the following code which I found in StackOverflow helped removing the files from the master branch:
git rm --cached `git ls-files -i --exclude-from=.gitignore`
If you are on windows, you can try:
git ls-files -i -z --exclude-from=.gitignore | xargs -0 git rm --cached
One thing I think is important is to update the .gitignore file before running the code in order to properly work.