Global Gitignore

Written by | 2 minutes read | Tags git, learning | Comments

For all my projects I was creating a local .gitignore files which keeps track of files I don’t want to have under version control. The most common ones are for me .*.sw*, .DS_Store, log/**/* or tags files. You don’t want to repeat yourself and you can put those file in a global gitignore file with the following command:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

It will create an entry in your ~/.gitconfig file like the following:

[user]
  name = Matthias Guenther
  email = matthias@wikimatze.de
[apply]
  whitespace = nowarn
[core]
  editor = vim
  autocrlf = input
  excludesfile = ~/.gitignore
  pager = cat

My personal .gitignore has the following contents:

----------
| Jekyll |
----------
_site/*

--------
| Ruby |
--------
*.gem
*.thor
bundle/**/*


-----------
| Padrino |
-----------
application.css
application.js
coverage/*
tags.html


--------
| Vim  |
--------
*.spl
*.sw*
backup/*
tags
yankring.txt
.netrwhist


----------------------
| Logs and databases |
----------------------
*.log
*.sql
*.sqlite


----------------------
| OS generated files |
----------------------
.DS_Store
.DS_Store?
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes
._*
Thumbs.db