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Repository-Specific Ignored Files in Git

Rob Hoelz on August 09, 2018

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, b...
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Sebastian Michaelsen • • Edited

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.

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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.

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Rob Hoelz •

Definitely agree on this!

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Rémi Lavedrine •

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

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Vlastimil Pospichal •

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

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Gabriel Ben Harosh •

This is useful information, thank you.

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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

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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!

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Ben Sinclair •

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

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beyrem Makhlouf •

Awesome

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Mac Siri •

This is really awesome!

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zeddotes •

Thanks for the tip :)