How to Ignore Local File Changes in Git

This article shows how we can ignore local file changes in Git when updating from a remote repository. Sometimes Git may greet you with the error shown below when you attempt to run the git pull.

Updating 0376abc..1chd7a5 error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge: README.md Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge. Aborting

So, how do we go about this?

Ignore Local File Changes in Git

In simpler terms, the error message above states that we need to remove or save our uncommitted changes to avoid conflicts when merging. This is usually the case when the git pull command will create files in the location of our uncommitted changes.

To resolve the issue, we need to clean our index. We can remove the tracked files using the git checkout command, as shown below.

In our case, the README.md file might cause conflicts. To remove the file from the index we will run:

$ git checkout README.md

This will discard the staged changes and revert the README.md file to its last committed state. If we have untracked files that might cause conflicts, we can use the git clean command, as shown below.

git clean -fd

It will remove all untracked files and folders from our index. Our repository is now ready for a git pull.

We have talked about removing the files from the index. Keep in mind that the above methods discard your changes.

What if we want to keep our uncommitted changes?

The easiest way to clean your index without discarding changes involves the git stash command. We can stash our tracked changes using the command shown below.

$ git stash

If we have an untracked file in our index, we will run:

$ git stash -u

The command above will stash both tracked and untracked changes.

We can now run the git pull command and apply our stashed changes, as shown below.

$ git stash pop

The command above will pop the stashed changes and apply them to our index.

In a nutshell, a git pull request requires your index to be clean. You can either remove uncommitted changes or stash them before updating from the remote.

This will ensure you do not get merge conflicts with your uncommitted changes.