.gitignore Tips-1: Don't ignore

Introduction

Git users know that gitignore files plays an important role to manage their source code repository.

.gitignore files helps developers to avoid sliding into chaos on their complex coding environment.

Ignoring the files below is a good practice to keep your source code repository cleaner:

• IDE configuration/cache files,
• User-specific files,
• Build output files,
• Auto-generated files,
• Secret/config files,
• Data files,
• Environment-specific files,
• Test result files,
• Dependency packages…

In this post series, some good practices about creating effective gitignore files will be noted into the pages of my personal notepad.

You can find a collection of .gitignore templates on this repository: https://github.com/github/gitignore

.gitignore Tips-1: Don’t ignore

   *.txt
   !important.txt

• This pattern ignores all txt files, but don’t ignore important.txt.

   *.txt
   !important/*.txt
   trace.*

• This pattern ignores all txt files, but don’t ignore .txt files under “important” folder. Note that it ignores “important/trace.txt” file, because last pattern causes to re-ignore previous pattern.

   tasks/
   !tasks/important.txt

• This pattern ignores “tasks” folder, and also ignores “tasks/important.txt” file.

“!” doesn’t work for this example. Due to a performance-related quirk in Git, you can not negate a file that is ignored due to a pattern matching a directory.