[git] Global Git ignore

I want to set up Git to globally ignore certain files.

I have added a .gitignore file to my home directory (/Users/me/) and I have added the following line to it:

*.tmproj

But it is not ignoring this type of files, any idea what I am doing wrong?

Although other answers are correct they are setting the global config value whereas there is a default git location for the global git ignore file:

*nix:

~/.config/git/ignore

Windows:

%USERPROFILE%\git\ignore

You may need to create git directory and ignore file but then you can put your global ignores into that file and that's it!

Source

Which file to place a pattern in depends on how the pattern is meant to be used.

…

• Patterns which a user wants Git to ignore in all situations (e.g., backup or temporary files generated by the user’s editor of choice) generally go into a file specified by core.excludesFile in the user’s ~/.gitconfig. Its default value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used instead.

on windows subsystem for linux I had to navigate to the subsystem root by cd ~/ then touch .gitignore and then update the global gitignore configuration in there.

I hope it helps someone.

I am able to ignore a .tmproj file by including either .tmproj or *.tmproj in my /users/me/.gitignore-global file.

Note that the file name is .gitignore-global not .gitignore. It did not work by including .tmproj or *.tmproj in a file called .gitignore in the /users/me directory.

From here.

If you create a file in your repo named .gitignore git will use its rules when looking at files to commit. Note that git will not ignore a file that was already tracked before a rule was added to this file to ignore it. In such a case the file must be un-tracked, usually with :

git rm --cached filename

Is it your case ?

Remember that running the command

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

will just set up the global file, but will NOT create it. For Windows check your Users directory for the .gitconfig file, and edit it to your preferences. In my case It's like that:

[core]
  excludesfile = c:/Users/myuser/Dropbox/Apps/Git/.gitignore

If you use Unix system, you can solve your problem in two commands. Where the first initialize configs and the second alters file with a file to ignore.

$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
$ echo '.idea' >> ~/.gitignore

If you're using VSCODE, you can get this extension to handle the task for you. It watches your workspace each time you save your work and helps you to automatically ignore the files and folders you specified in your vscode settings.json ignoreit (vscode extension)

1. Create a .gitignore file in your home directory

touch ~/.gitignore

2. Add files to it (folders aren't recognised)

Example

# these work
*.gz
*.tmproj
*.7z

# these won't as they are folders
.vscode/
build/

# but you can do this
.vscode/*
build/*

3. Check if a git already has a global gitignore

git config --get core.excludesfile

4. Tell git where the file is

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

Voila!!

Before reconfiguring the global excludes file, you might want to check what it's currently configured to, using this command:

git config --get core.excludesfile

In my case, when I ran it I saw my global excludes file was configured to

~/.gitignore_global

and there were already a couple things listed there. So in the case of the given question, it might make sense to first check for an existing excludes file, and add the new file mask to it.

To create global gitignore from scratch:

$ cd ~
$ touch .gitignore_global
$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

1. First line changes directory to C:/Users/User
2. After that you create an empty file with .gitignore_global extension
3. And finally setting global ignore to that file.
4. Then you should open it with some kind of notepad and add the needed ignore rules.

You should create an exclude file for this. Check out this gist which is pretty self explanatory.

To address your question though, you may need to either de-index the .tmproj file (if you've already added it to the index) with git rm --cached path/to/.tmproj, or git add and commit your .gitignore file.