Git ignore file change but only once?

Question

Does Git have some kind of "ignore once" function?

I want git to ignore a change to a file only this time, is it possible?

I have a tracked file with variables , I want to change:

Debug: 'true'

too be 'false',

• I don't want the file to show up when staging files, so I can do a "stage all".
• I also don't want to add the file to .gitignore, because the file contains other variables that changes & should be tracked.
• I don't want to push the Debug: 'false', because that would just make other people have the opposite problem with wanting to have the Debug: 'true' without tracking.

Is this possible?

I'm aware of:

git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

But if I understand it correctly it will continue to not track the changes untill I use the --no-assume-unchanged flag to start tracking.

Can I first use --assume-unchanged then do the change & then use --no-assume-unchanged to bypass the tracking?

Answer 1

No, you can't do that - once you --no-assume-unchanged, Git will detect your change and try to commit it, unless you are consciously avoiding it, never using commit --auto, and add --patch whenever you have changes in your config file that you do want to commit. In other words, you can only automatically ignore a file, you can't ignore a specific change in the file.

You could do the following sequence:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>
git add --patch <file>
# pick and choose what you want for yourself only
git commit
git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

each time you change something, but... what if someone forgets?

The typical way to solve this issue is to have an uncommitted config file (added to .gitignore), accompanied by a committed example of the config file (usually named *.sample, *.example, *.skeleton or similar). This way, changes are never propagated to your collaborators. When you make a change in the structure of the config file, make sure to also change the example, so other people can follow suit. Each collaborator would be expected to copy the example to create the real config file, which they can then customise for their environment.