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This article explains how to add all files to commit while excluding selected files. This comes in handy when you have many files to include in a commit and must leave out one file.

Instead of adding files one at a time, you can follow these simple steps.

Add all but one file to commit

Take a look at the following example. Suppose we have more than twenty modified files, how can we add all but one?

Let's say we want to exclude requirements.txt file from indexing . How would we go about this?

We can use multiple commands to exclude our requirements.txt file when staging. These are:

Use git reset command

When you use the git reset command, you must add all files to the index and then unstage the required files.

grammar:

# Start by staging all files
$ git add .
# To exclude a file
$ git reset -- path/to/file
# To exclude a folder
$ git reset -- path/to/folder/*

In our case, we will add all the files and unstage the requirements.txt file as shown in the following image.

$ git add .

This will stage all files. To unstage the requirements.txt file we will run:

$ git reset -- path/to/requirements.txt

This command should unstage our requirements.txt file.

Using Exclude Path Specifications

Git versions 1.9.0 and later allow us to remove one or more paths when adding files to be committed. This can be :(exclude) pathspecachieved with , which can also be written as :!or :^.

Here is an example.

$ git add --all -- ':!path/to/requirements.txt'

Exclude a folder

$ git add --all -- ':!path/to/folder/*'

Temporarily exclude files from tracing

We can temporarily exclude our requirements.txt file from being tracked as shown in the image below.

$ git update-index --assume-unchanged path/to/requirements.txt

Git will exclude our requirements.txt file every time we run the git add command. To list all files marked with , we would run:--assume-unchanged

$ git ls-files -v | grep "^h"

To remove our files from the exclusion list we would run:

$ git update-index --no-assume-unchanged path/to/requirements.txt

In short, there are several ways to add all but one file to the index. As we discussed, temporarily excluding a file from tracking is the cleanest and most efficient.