There are times when a project needs to include the default version of a file in the git repository that will subsequently change to support development (e.g., secret application key or sqlite3 database).
After committing the safe default copy, any subsequent changes to the files will appear as a modified file in ‘git status’ reports and will also prevent any git flow feature finish operations if the files are not staged for commit.
Adding the files to .gitignore makes no difference.
There is a way, however, to tell git to stop tracking the file,
$ git rm --cached file1 file2
Taken from a StackOverflow posting.
Dough, mud and penguins 