Global gitignore

git

07/05/2021


Have you ever accidentally committed a .DS_Store file? or started at a new company and opened up a PR adding .vscode or .idea folders to a repo's .gitignore? Keep those pesky user specific config files out of your repo easily by creating a global gitignore file.

.gitignore
GITIGNORE
.DS_Store
.idea
.vscoe

Save this file off somewhere; I would recommend ~/.gitignore or maybe in your dotfiles repo, and then either run:

SHELL
$ git config --global core.excludesFile /path/to/globalgitignore

or to your gitconfig

INI:.GITCONFIG
[core]
excludesfile = /path/to/globalgitignore

This does not replace the need for a repo's gitignore. I would still recommend keeping output and artifacts of your code bases in repo-specific ignore files to 1. keep the context of things that a repo produces that we don't want to version and 2. avoid every dev having to update their global gitignore.


WRITTEN BY

Sr. Software Engineer