Use Git Ignore Check to See Why a File Is Ignored

Having Git issues with your file not being detected? Your file might be git ignored. You can use the git check-ignore command to verify if your file is gitnored. It will tell you also which gitignore if you have multiple and which line.

So let’s say we have this directory structure;

> ls -a 
.git
.gitignore
all.json
js

> cd js
> ls -a
.gitignore
foo.js

So we have a git project with a file all.json and a .gitignore in the root. We also have a directory called js which also has a .gitignore in it and a file call foo.js. Let’s take a peek at the gitignores:

> pwd
/Users/me/git-check
> ls -a
.git
.gitignore
all.json
js
> cat .gitignore
all.json

> cd js
> cat .gitignore
foo.js

So, we can see that in the root all.json is ignored and in the js directory we’re ignoring foo.js. Let’s see what happens when we use git check-ignore

> git check-ignore -v all.json
.gitignore:1:all.json	all.json

> git check-ignore -v js/foo.js
js/.gitignore:1:foo.js	js/foo.js

The -v is a verbose flag and gives us the line number and the actual .gitignore which is useful information to have. This Stackoverflow answer is a good running commentary from the author who actually implemented the git check-ignore feature.