How to Remove a File From a Git Repository but Keep It Locally

For a video project, I have a video folder with videos and subtitle files.

Obviously, I do not want to have hundreds of megabytes in my git repository, so I git ignored them - but I committed the subtitles.

Now, the videos and the subtitles will be served by nginx from a media directory, outside of the project.

In order to delete the subtitles from the git repository, but keep them locally, I have to…

git rm -- cached somefile.ext

This also works for directories…

git rm --cached -r somedir