Introduction
The .gitignore file is a simple text file that tells Git which files and folders in a repo it should ignore. These files can be stored at the repo level or at the global level. To get a good setup for your needs, you can use gitignore.io to create your file with the entries you need.
WARNING: Files already being tracked by Git are not affected by adding this file.
To use a global .gitignore file, create the file in your home directory:
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touch ~/.gitignore_global
Once you have the file created, run the following command to add it to your git configuration:
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git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global
Structure
Ignores in your .gitignore are made one entry per line.
- Lines that start with
#are comments. - Escape key
\are used when patterns start with#. - The slash
/is used as the directory separator. - An asterisk
*matches anything except a slash. - The character
?matches any one character except/. - The range notation, e.g.
[a-zA-Z], can be used to match one of the characters in a range. - A leading
**/followed by a slash means match in all directories. - A trailing
/**matches everything inside. - A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks then a slash eg.
a/**/bmatches zero or more directories.
Example .gitignore file
This is a basic .gitignore file. There are numerous things you can add depending on the OS you use down to the language you develop on that will determine the entries in your .gitignore file. You may even choose to have a setup where you have multiple name.gitignore type structure which I will not cover.
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# Created by https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/ruby,jekyll,macos
# Edit at https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore?templates=ruby,jekyll,macos
# MkDocs documentation
site/
# Packages
*.7z
*.dmg
*.gz
*.iso
*.jar
*.rar
*.tar
*.zip
### macOS ###
# General
.DS_Store
.AppleDouble
.LSOverride
# Icon must end with two \r
Icon
# Thumbnails
._*
# Files that might appear in the root of a volume
.DocumentRevisions-V100
.fseventsd
.Spotlight-V100
.TemporaryItems
.Trashes
.VolumeIcon.icns
.com.apple.timemachine.donotpresent
# Directories potentially created on remote AFP share
.AppleDB
.AppleDesktop
Network Trash Folder
Temporary Items
.apdisk
### Jekyll ###
_site/
.sass-cache/
.jekyll-cache/
.jekyll-metadata
### Ruby ###
*.gem
*.rbc
/.config
/coverage/
/InstalledFiles
/pkg/
/spec/reports/
/spec/examples.txt
/test/tmp/
/test/version_tmp/
/tmp/
# Used by dotenv library to load environment variables.
# .env
# Ignore Byebug command history file.
.byebug_history
## Specific to RubyMotion:
.dat*
.repl_history
build/
*.bridgesupport
build-iPhoneOS/
build-iPhoneSimulator/
## Specific to RubyMotion (use of CocoaPods):
#
# We recommend against adding the Pods directory to your .gitignore. However
# you should judge for yourself, the pros and cons are mentioned at:
# https://guides.cocoapods.org/using/using-cocoapods.html#should-i-check-the-pods-directory-into-source-control
# vendor/Pods/
## Documentation cache and generated files:
/.yardoc/
/_yardoc/
/doc/
/rdoc/
## Environment normalization:
/.bundle/
/vendor/bundle
/lib/bundler/man/
# for a library or gem, you might want to ignore these files since the code is
# intended to run in multiple environments; otherwise, check them in:
# Gemfile.lock
# .ruby-version
# .ruby-gemset
# unless supporting rvm < 1.11.0 or doing something fancy, ignore this:
.rvmrc
# Used by RuboCop. Remote config files pulled in from inherit_from directive.
# .rubocop-https?--*
# End of https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/ruby,jekyll,macos