Repository-Specific Ignored Files in Git

Originally published at hoelz.ro

Have you ever been working in a Git repository and wanted Git commands like git status to ignore certain files, but you didn't want to contaminate the project's .gitignore file with your specific ignore rules? Well, with .git/info/exclude, you can!

Let's say you want to ignore a file called notes. I do this a lot, because I don't like polluting the revision history when I make changes to notes I have about a project.

Instead of doing this:

  $ echo notes >> .gitignore

do this:

  $ echo notes >> .git/info/exclude

.git/info/exclude is never shared between repositories, so you can keep some files to yourself without the extra output from git status and friends.

You can also add ignore patterns specific to your computer using ~/.gitconfig; simply add the following (or something like it):

[core]
  excludesfile = /home/myuser/.gitignore

Now /home/myuser/.gitignore will also be consulted for ignore patterns!

Comments

[Sebastian Michaelsen]

Your personal .gitignore should contain files/directories that are produced by your OS, IDE and personal tools.
In my opinion things like .idea, .DS_Store, Thumbs.db do not belong in a project's .gitignore but in personal ignore files.

[Ben Sinclair]

I agree, but the number of other developers on any random project who use badly-behaved OS or IDEs is often quite high. You could tell them to use a particular .gitignore configuration and double-check all their commits, or you could just include it all in the repo and forget about it.

[Rob Hoelz]

Definitely agree on this!

[Rémi Lavedrine]

I didn't know that one, that is interesting indeed.

[Vlastimil Pospichal]

I have two git macros for edit these files: git ignore and git exclude.

[Florimond Manca]

Great tip! Definitely useful instead of polluting the repo’s gitignore. The fact that you can define a global configuration applied to all repos is awesome. Too bad it’s not known more!

[Ben Sinclair]

How do you know it's not well-known? :P

[Gabriel Ben Harosh]

This is useful information, thank you.

[Andy Zhao (he/him)]

Cool tip! Thanks for sharing. I've kept things in a separate folder for a long time, or just remember to not add it, which ends up taking more bandwidth than I'd like.

cc @maestromac

[Mac Siri]

This is really awesome!

[zeddotes]

Thanks for the tip :)

[beyrem Makhlouf]

Awesome