To remove a file from Git's tracking without deleting it from your working directory, you can use the git rm --cached command. This tells Git to stop tracking the specified file while leaving it intact in your working directory. Here's how to do it:
1. Open your command line or terminal.
2. Navigate to your repository:
cd path/to/your/repo
3. Run the following command:
git rm --cached path/to/your/file
Replace path/to/your/file with the actual path to the file you want to untrack.
4. Commit the change:
After running the above command, you need to commit the change to your repository to reflect that the file is no longer tracked.
git commit -m "Stopped tracking file"
Important Notes:
- The file will remain in your working directory, but it will no longer be tracked by Git.
- If you want to ensure that Git doesn't track this file in the future, consider adding it to your .gitignore file after you have removed it from tracking.
Example:
If you have a file named config.txt that you want to remove from Git tracking but keep in your directory, you would do the following:
git rm --cached config.txt
git commit -m "Untrack config.txt"
And then optionally add config.txt to your .gitignore file to prevent it from being tracked in future commits.