Git - Ignore files during merge

I have a repo called myrepo on the remote beanstalk server.

I cloned it to my local machine. Created two additional branches: staging and dev. Pushed these branches to remote as well.

Now:

 local                   remote                   server
 --------------------------------------------------------  
 master  ==> Pushes to  `master`  ==> deployed to `prod`
 staging ==> Pushes to  `staging` ==> deployed to `staging`
 dev     ==> Pushes to  `dev`     ==> deployed to `dev`

I have a file called config.xml which is different on each branch.

I want to ignore this file only during merges. But I want this to be included when I checkout or commit from / to the repo branch.

The reason I want this is, we have a deploy script that pulls (checkout) the specific branch and deploys on the respective servers. So we need config.xml file of that specific branch go into the specific server as indicated above when deployed.

I guess .gitignore wont work. What are the other options? Note that the ignored file should be part of checkout and commit, which is important. it should be ignored only during merges.

Thanks!

I got over this issue by using git merge command with the --no-commit option and then explicitly removed the staged file and ignore the changes to the file. E.g.: say I want to ignore any changes to myfile.txt I proceed as follows:

git merge --no-ff --no-commit <merge-branch>
git reset HEAD myfile.txt
git checkout -- myfile.txt
git commit -m "merged <merge-branch>"

You can put statements 2 & 3 in a for loop, if you have a list of files to skip.

I ended up finding git attributes. Trying it. Working so far. Did not check all scenarios yet. But it should be the solution.

Merge Strategies - Git attributes

.gitattributes - is a root-level file of your repository that defines the attributes for a subdirectory or subset of files.

You can specify the attribute to tell Git to use different merge strategies for a specific file. Here, we want to preserve the existing config.xml for our branch. We need to set the merge=foo to config.xml in .gitattributes file.

merge=foo tell git to use our(current branch) file, if a merge conflict occurs.

1. Add a .gitattributes file at the root level of the repository

2. You can set up an attribute for confix.xml in the .gitattributes file

    <pattern> merge=foo
   

   Let's take an example for config.xml

    config.xml merge=foo
   

3. And then define a dummy foo merge strategy with:

    $ git config --global merge.foo.driver true
   

If you merge the stag form dev branch, instead of having the merge conflicts with the config.xml file, the stag branch's config.xml preserves at whatever version you originally had.

for more reference: merge_strategies

You could start by using git merge --no-commit, and then edit the merge however you like i.e. by unstaging config.xml or any other file, then commit. I suspect you'd want to automate it further after that using hooks, but I think it'd be worth going through manually at least once.

Example:

1. You have two branches: master, develop
2. You created file in develop branch and want to ignore it while merging

Code:

git config --global merge.ours.driver true
git checkout master
echo "path/file_to_ignore merge=ours" >> .gitattributes
git merge develop

You can also ignore files with same extension

for example all files with .txt extension:

echo "*.txt merge=ours" >> .gitattributes