Are multiple gitignore s frowned on

Question

Unless a repo consisted of several independent projects  it seems it would be simplest to just have one  gitignore file at the root of the repo than various ones throughout   Is there a standard best practice on this or some analysis online of when one approach is better than the other

User · Answer

You can have multiple  gitignore  each one of course in its own directory  To check which gitignore rule is responsible for ignoring a file  use git check-ignore  git check-ignore -v -- afile   And you can have different version of a  gitignore file per branch  I have already seen that kind of configuration for ensuring one branch ignores a file while the other branch does not  see this question for instance   If your repo includes several independent projects  it would be best to reference them as submodules though  That would be the actual best practices  allowing each of those projects to be cloned independently  with their respective  gitignore files   while being referenced by a specific revision in a global parent project  See true nature of submodules for more     Note that  since git 1 8 2  March 2013  you can do a git check-ignore -v -- yourfile in order to see which gitignore run  from which  gitignore file  is applied to  yourfile   and better understand why said file is ignored  See  which gitignore rule is ignoring my file

User · Answer

There are many scenarios where you want to commit a directory to your Git repo but without the files in it  for example the logs  cache  uploads directories etc   So what I always do is to add a  gitignore file in those directories with the following content       gitignore   With this  gitignore file  Git will not track any files in those directories yet still allow me to add the  gitignore file and hence the directory itself to the repo

User · Answer

I can think of at least two situations where you would want to have multiple  gitignore files in different  sub directories    Different directories have different types of file to ignore   For example the  gitignore in the top directory of your project ignores generated programs  while Documentation  gitignore ignores generated documentation  Ignore given files only in given  sub directory  you can use  sub foo in  gitignore  though     Please remember that patterns in  gitignore file apply recursively to the  sub directory the file is in and all its subdirectories  unless pattern contains      so e g   pattern name applies to any file named name in given directory and all its subdirectories  while  name applies to file with this name only in given directory

User · Answer

As a tangential note  one case where the ability to have multiple  gitignore files is very useful is if you want an extra directory in your working copy that you never intend to commit  Just put a 1-byte  gitignore  containing just a single asterisk  in that directory and it will never show up in git status etc

User · Answer

Pro single   Easy to find  Hunting down exclusion rules can be quite difficult if I have multiple gitignore  at several levels in the repo  With multiple files  you also typically wind up with a fair bit of duplication    Pro multiple   Scopes  knowledge  to the part of the file tree where it is needed  Since Git only tracks files  an empty  gitignore is the only way to commit an  empty  directory    And before Git 1 8  the only way to exclude a pattern like my    example was to create my  gitignore in  with the pattern    foo  This reason doesn t apply now  as you can do  my      example       I much prefer a single file  where I can find all the exclusions  I ve never missed per-directory  svn  and I won t miss per-directory  gitignore either   That said  multiple gitignores are quite common  If you do use them  at least be consistent in their use to make them reasonable to work with  For example  you may put them in directories only one level from the root

[git] Are multiple `.gitignore`s frowned on?

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