Git - Ignore files during merge

I got over this issue by using git merge command with the --no-commit option and then explicitly removed the staged file and ignore the changes to the file.E.g.: say I want to ignore any changes to myfile.txt I proceed as follows:

git merge --no-ff --no-commit <merge-branch>git reset HEAD myfile.txtgit checkout -- myfile.txtgit commit -m "merged <merge-branch>"

You can put statements 2 & 3 in a for loop, if you have a list of files to skip.

I ended up finding git attributes. Trying it. Working so far. Did not check all scenarios yet. But it should be the solution.

Merge Strategies - Git attributes

.gitattributes - is a root-level file of your repository that defines the attributes for a subdirectory or subset of files.

You can specify the attribute to tell Git to use different merge strategies for a specific file. Here, we want to preserve the existing config.xml for our branch.We need to set the merge=foo to config.xml in .gitattributes file.

merge=foo tell git to use our(current branch) file, if a merge conflict occurs.

1. Add a .gitattributes file at the root level of the repository

2. You can set up an attribute for confix.xml in the .gitattributes file

    <pattern> merge=foo

   Let's take an example for config.xml

    config.xml merge=foo

3. And then define a dummy foo merge strategy with:

    $ git config --global merge.foo.driver true

If you merge the stag form dev branch, instead of having the merge conflicts with the config.xml file, the stag branch's config.xml preserves at whatever version you originally had.

for more reference: merge_strategies