Ignoring files in git, but only locally

I love git for one main reason: there are enough advanced commands to make nearly any problem find a solution. Ignoring some files, but only in your repository, is one of those.

For example, when doing terraform, I sometime set development-time variables in the terraform.tfvars file that exist for that exact purpose, say for my AWS credentials, and I really don’t want the file to be committed. All the same, I probably don’t want to be adding that file to the ignore list for everyone, which is the .gitignore file.

Instead, you can add your ignore to .git/info/exclude. I tend to do that from the command line.

$ echo 'myfolder/terraform.tfvars' >> .git/info/exclude