Once the file has been pushed, adding it to gitignore afterwards would not untrack the file from that commit. The file would still be present in the repository.

If you are having that kind of issue, follow these simple 5 steps to solve the problem.

Step 1:

Git commit

Make sure the changes you have made on the projects have been added and committed, including the .gitignore file.

Do this by:

git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"

Step 2:

Remove all the files in the repository.

You do that by:

git rm -r --cached .

rm is the remove command which removes all the files in the repo, adding -cached allow us to remove the files from the index. Our files are still present.

Step 3:

Add everything

The next step is to re-add/track our files. By doing this, the files in the . gitignore file will not be tracked.

This is done by:

git add .

Step 4:

Commit the changes.

Thus, let's commit our changes by

git commit -m "gitignore fix"

Step 5:

Push to GitHub

After we are through with everything, we still need to push it to our online GitHub repository by

git push

Thanks for reading.