.gitignore is still not ignoring files despite removal

Question

I know there are many, many posts on this topic. I've tried all of the answers I can find and none of them seem to be addressing my problem.

I started a git project where unfortunately .pyc files in __pycache__ directories were initially being tracked. I realised the problem and then put *.pyc and __pycache__ in .gitignore, but of course they were still being tracked.

I then:

• Tried to remove the tracked files:

  git rm -r --cached .
  git add .
  git commit -m "fixed untracked files" 
  

• Checked my .gitignore. The encoding, according to file -I .gitignore, is .gitignore: text/plain; charset=us-ascii. The .gitignore itself is:

  __pycache__
  *.pyc
  buildSite/.DS_Store
  *.DS_Store
  .idea/
  .idea/workspace.xml
  scratchFiles
  

  There aren't any extra whitespaces or anything.

I'm still getting .pyc files showing changes:

git status
...
modified:   buildSite/builder/templatetags/__pycache__/class_tag.cpython-36.pyc

Very grateful for any suggestions!

Answer 1

Make sure:

• there is no crlf in your .gitignore file
• there is no nested git repo (.git/ subolder) in any parent folder of your files to be ignored
• there is a trailing / when ignoring a folder: __pycache__/, not __pycache__.