Ignore files in a git repository
Use .gitignore to allow sharing ignoring rules (version controlled)
If you want some files being untracked in a repository, create an .gitignore
file at its root directory and commit it. .gitignore
file is used to list all the file patterns to ignore, standard glob patterns work in it.
Basic rules for patterns have been included in below example .gitignore
file :
# ignore all .class files
*.class
# exclude lib.class from '*.o', meaning all lib.class are still tracked
!lib.class
# ignore all json files whose name begin with 'temp-'
temp-*.json
# only ignore the build.log file in current directory, not those in its subdirectories
/build.log
# specify a folder with slash in the end
# ignore all files in any directory named temp
temp/
# ignore doc/notes.txt, but not doc/server/arch.txt
bin/*.txt
# ignore all .pdf files in the doc/ directory and any of its subdirectories
# /** matches 0 or more directories
doc/**/*.pdf
Remember to commit it:
$ git add .gitignore
$ git commit
Note: Adding new patterns in
.gitignore
won’t affect the files already tracked by Git. You can stop tracking a file.You can have more than one
.gitignore
file in subdirectories. Its content will only apply to the folder it resides.
Use .git/info/exclude to only ignore files locally (not version controlled)
If you just want a personal and local ignoring configuration without committing a .gitignore
file, use .git/info/exclude
to achieve that.
What you do is just adding exclude rules in .git/info/exclude
within in the root of a repository.
Any rule added in the file will not be pushed to a remote repository. This way enables you to ignore locally generated files and no need to worry about other users.
Ignore files in all repositories
If you want to ignore some files for all repositories, you can set a global gitignore file. Below is an example to ignore .DS_Store
files :
File ~/.gitignore_global
:
*~
.*.swp
.DS_Store
Then configure it as your global gitignore settings in Git :
$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global
Debug gitignore files
check-ignore
command can be used to debug if a file/folder is excluded by some ignoring/exclude rules you’ve set up :
$ git check-ignore -v <pathname>
If the pathname matches an exclude pattern, it outputs the gitignore
file, line number, pattern and your query pathname. Otherwise, nothing is output.
Note: By default, tracked files are not output since they are not subject to exclude rules. If a file is tracked before and untracked currently, it can be output.
Below example to debug if user.csv
is excluded:
# Debug whether user.csv is exclude by some ignoring rule
$ git check-ignore -v users.csv
.gitignore:3:*.csv user.csv
Here user.csv
is excluded by *.csv
pattern in .gitignore
.
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