Ignore files
From time to time there are files you don't want git to track. There are a few methods of telling git what files to ignore.
.gitignore
If you create a file in your repo named .gitignore git will use its rules when looking at files to commit. Note that git will not ignore a file that was already tracked before a rule was added to this file to ignore it. In such a case the file must be un-tracked, usually with git rm --cached filename
This file can be committed into the repo, thus sharing the rule list with any other users that clone the repo.
Note that you can create a .gitignore in any subpath to have its rules applied at that path. Sometimes an empty .gitignore file is used as a placeholder for an empty path, for example to force git to generate a log/ path for your development environment to use.
Global .gitignore
A global .gitignore file can also be used by adding one to your global git config. For example, you might create the file ~/.gitignore_global and add some rules to it. To add this to your config, run git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global
Some good rules to add to this file:
# Compiled source # ################### *.com *.class *.dll *.exe *.o *.so # Packages # ############ # it's better to unpack these files and commit the raw source # git has its own built in compression methods *.7z *.dmg *.gz *.iso *.jar *.rar *.tar *.zip # Logs and databases # ###################### *.log *.sql *.sqlite # OS generated files # ###################### .DS_Store* ehthumbs.db Icon? Thumbs.db
Repo exclude
Local per-repo rules can be added to the .git/info/exclude file in your repo. These rules are not committed with the repo so they are not shared with others. This method can be used for locally-generated files that you don’t expect other users to generate, like files created by your editor.
