I found myself contributing to an open source project
recently … here & here. First thing that I thought
awkward was that the project’s .gitignore file paid no attention to OS-
generated or editor-generated files. So I happily contributed those exclusions
to the project’s .gitignore so we ended up with this …
# Editor Files #
*.komodoproject
# OS generated files #
.DS_Store
.DS_Store?
._*
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes
Icon?
ehthumbs.db
Thumbs.db
Which isn’t elegant. At all.
I have a slight problem with this, though. The .DS_Store isn’t related to your project, it is related to the system you’re coding on. Your .gitignore file will be a lot more elegant if it only lists files that are related to the projects.
Solution
Git has a global configuration that applies rules to all of your projects.
On linux for example:
$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.global_ignore
On Windows (if using GitHub. for Windows) the .gitconfig file lives in the
user’s home directory. In my case, for example ( & on Windows Vista/8), the
location of the .gitconfig file is C:\Users\YOU\.gitconfig. To set up a
global gitconfig, I use a directory C:\Users\YOU\config\ containing a file
called global_ignore, and in .gitconfig I would add;
[user]
name = King'ori Maina
email = j@kingori.co
[core]
excludesfile = C:/Users/itskingori/configs/global_ignore
And finally in the global_ignore file we have something like;
## Editor Files ##
*.sublime-project
*.sublime-workspace
## Backup ##
*.bak
## Logs and databases ##
*.log
*.sql
*.sqlite
## Packages ##
# it's better to unpack these files and commit the raw source
# git has its own built in compression methods
*.7z
*.dmg
*.gz
*.iso
*.jar
*.rar
*.tar
*.zip
# OS generated files #
$RECYCLE.BIN/
.DS_Store
.DS_Store?
._*
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes
Desktop.ini
Icon?
ehthumbs.db
Thumbs.db
Of course this is my pref, feel free to use whatever suits you.