NAME¶
gitignore - Specifies intentionally untracked files to ignore
SYNOPSIS¶
$GIT_DIR/info/exclude, .gitignore
DESCRIPTION¶
A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git
should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the NOTES
below for details.
Each line in a gitignore file specifies a pattern. When deciding
whether to ignore a path, Git normally checks gitignore patterns from
multiple sources, with the following order of precedence, from highest to
lowest (within one level of precedence, the last matching pattern decides
the outcome):
•Patterns read from the command line for those
commands that support them.
•Patterns read from a .gitignore file in the same
directory as the path, or in any parent directory, with patterns in the higher
level files (up to the toplevel of the work tree) being overridden by those in
lower level files down to the directory containing the file. These patterns
match relative to the location of the .gitignore file. A project normally
includes such .gitignore files in its repository, containing patterns for
files generated as part of the project build.
•Patterns read from $GIT_DIR/info/exclude.
•Patterns read from the file specified by the
configuration variable core.excludesfile.
Which file to place a pattern in depends on how the pattern is
meant to be used.
•Patterns which should be version-controlled and
distributed to other repositories via clone (i.e., files that all developers
will want to ignore) should go into a .gitignore file.
•Patterns which are specific to a particular
repository but which do not need to be shared with other related repositories
(e.g., auxiliary files that live inside the repository but are specific to one
user’s workflow) should go into the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file.
•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.
The underlying Git plumbing tools, such as git ls-files and
git read-tree, read gitignore patterns specified by command-line
options, or from files specified by command-line options. Higher-level Git
tools, such as git status and git add, use patterns from the
sources specified above.
•A blank line matches no files, so it can serve as
a separator for readability.
•A line starting with # serves as a comment. Put a
backslash ("\") in front of the first hash for patterns that begin
with a hash.
•An optional prefix "!" which negates
the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become
included again. If a negated pattern matches, this will override lower
precedence patterns sources. Put a backslash ("\") in front of the
first "!" for patterns that begin with a literal "!", for
example, "\!important!.txt".
•If the pattern ends with a slash, it is removed
for the purpose of the following description, but it would only find a match
with a directory. In other words, foo/ will match a directory foo and paths
underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a symbolic link foo (this
is consistent with the way how pathspec works in general in Git).
•If the pattern does not contain a slash /,
Git treats it as a shell glob pattern and checks for a match against the
pathname relative to the location of the .gitignore file (relative to the
toplevel of the work tree if not from a .gitignore file).
•Otherwise, Git treats the pattern as a shell glob
suitable for consumption by
fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag: wildcards
in the pattern will not match a / in the pathname. For example,
"Documentation/*.html" matches "Documentation/git.html"
but not "Documentation/ppc/ppc.html" or
"tools/perf/Documentation/perf.html".
•A leading slash matches the beginning of the
pathname. For example, "/*.c" matches "cat-file.c" but not
"mozilla-sha1/sha1.c".
Two consecutive asterisks ("**") in patterns matched
against full pathname may have special meaning:
•A leading "**" followed by a slash
means match in all directories. For example, "**/foo" matches file
or directory "foo" anywhere, the same as pattern "foo".
"**/foo/bar" matches file or directory "bar" anywhere that
is directly under directory "foo".
•A trailing "/" matches everything
inside. For example, "abc/" matches all files inside directory
"abc", relative to the location of the .gitignore file, with
infinite depth.
•A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks
then a slash matches zero or more directories. For example, "a/**/b"
matches "a/b", "a/x/b", "a/x/y/b" and so
on.
•Other consecutive asterisks are considered
invalid.
NOTES¶
The purpose of gitignore files is to ensure that certain files not
tracked by Git remain untracked.
To ignore uncommitted changes in a file that is already tracked,
use git update-index --assume-unchanged.
To stop tracking a file that is currently tracked, use git rm
--cached.
EXAMPLES¶
$ git status
[...]
# Untracked files:
[...]
# Documentation/foo.html
# Documentation/gitignore.html
# file.o
# lib.a
# src/internal.o
[...]
$ cat .git/info/exclude
# ignore objects and archives, anywhere in the tree.
*.[oa]
$ cat Documentation/.gitignore
# ignore generated html files,
*.html
# except foo.html which is maintained by hand
!foo.html
$ git status
[...]
# Untracked files:
[...]
# Documentation/foo.html
[...]
Another example:
$ cat .gitignore
vmlinux*
$ ls arch/foo/kernel/vm*
arch/foo/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
$ echo '!/vmlinux*' >arch/foo/kernel/.gitignore
The second .gitignore prevents Git from ignoring
arch/foo/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S.