How to completely ignore directories that until now I was tracking under version control using git?

I am using Ruby on Rails, the Capistrano gem and git. I would like to do not put anymore under version control some directories that until now I was tracking.

For my application I have a file system structure like the following:

...
.gitignore
/public/aaa/000/001
/public/aaa/000/002
/public/aaa/000/003
/public/aaa/000/...

To accomplish that I aim, I changed the .gitignore file and added to it the following lines:

# Ignoring "/public/aaa/*" directories
public/aaa/

However, if I check what directories are under version control, I see that those I would like to ignore are still tracked. So, when I deploy with Capistrano to the remote server the content of those directories is still changing.

How can I definitely ignore those directories?

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In few words, what I would like to do is to do not change public/aaa directories and files on the remote machine (and, thus, to do not track those with git on my local machine) so that when I dep开发者_开发百科loy with Capistrano those folders (on the remote machine) are untouched.

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You'll need to remove them before they'll disappear from source control. They're still part of your git repo, so git is going to continue paying attention to them.

git rm -r --cached public/aaa

The -r tells git to remove the directory (just like rm -r in the console) and --cached tells git to leave the file(s), just remove it from the repo.

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You could use git update-index --assume-unchanged <filename>. This will keep the files around, but will no longer track their changes.

You can do this recursively with
find ./folder/ -type f | xargs git update-index --assume-unchanged