Should you commit gitignore into the Git repos

Question

Do you think it is a good practice to commit  gitignore into a Git repo   Some people don t like it  but I think it is good as you can track the file s history  Isn t it

User · Answer

I put commit  gitignore  which is a courtesy to other who may build my project that the following files are derived and should be ignored   I usually do a hybrid   I like to make makefile generate the  gitignore file since the makefile will know all the files associated with the project -derived or otherwise   Then have a top level project  gitignore that you check in  which would ignore the generated  gitignore files created by the makefile for the various sub directories   So in my project  I might have a bin sub directory with all the built executables   Then  I ll have my makefile generate a  gitignore for that bin directory   And in the top directory  gitignore that lists bin  gitignore   The top one is the one I check in

User · Answer

It is a good practice to  gitignore at least your build products  programs    o  etc

User · Answer

You typically do commit  gitignore  In fact  I personally go as far as making sure my index is always clean when I m not working on something   git status should show nothing    There are cases where you want to ignore stuff that really isn t project specific  For example  your text editor may create automatic    backup files  or another example would be the  DS Store files created by OS X   I d say  if others are complaining about those rules cluttering up your  gitignore  leave them out and instead put them in a global excludes file   By default this file resides in  XDG CONFIG HOME git ignore  defaults to    config git ignore   but this location can be changed by setting the core excludesfile option  For example   git config --global core excludesfile    gitignore   Simply create and edit the global excludesfile to your heart s content  it ll apply to every git repository you work on on that machine

User · Answer

Committing  gitignore can be very useful but you want to make sure you don t modify it too much thereafter especially if you regularly switch between branches  If you do you might get cases where files are ignored in a branch and not in the other  forcing you to go manually delete or rename files in your work directory because a checkout failed as it would overwrite a non-tracked file   Therefore yes  do commit your  gitignore  but not before you are reasonably sure it won t change that much thereafter

User · Answer

Normally yes   gitignore is useful for everyone who wants to work with the repository  On occasion you ll want to ignore more private things  maybe you often create LOG or something   In those cases you probably don t want to force that on anyone else

[git] Should you commit .gitignore into the Git repos?

Examples related to git

Examples related to gitignore