Solution- The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge

ByAnkush Jain| Last Updated On Wednesday, Jan 16, 2019

Git

Disclaimer: I am a consultant at Amazon Web Services, and this is my personal blog. The opinions expressed here are solely mine and do not reflect the views of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Any statements made should not be considered official endorsements or statements by AWS.

Below, I have mentioned both root-cause & solution of the above error.

Root Cause

It seems that the files you want to ignore are already committed to the repository. And .gitignore doesn't actually ignore the files which are already committed into the repository.

Note that here untracked working tree files mean that git is considering these files as untracked because .gitignore file has their entries.

Solution

You can fix this issue by the following below easy steps:

1. Create a new feature branch or separate branch.
2. Delete the files which you actually want to ignore. (i.e. files mentioned in .gitignore)
3. Commit these deleted files & push the code.
4. Now, raise the pull request to merge this feature branch into your actual main branch.
5. Now, this issue has been fixed in the main branch. You won't get this issue again.