Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore

https://rubenerd.com/git-ignores-gitignore-with-gitignore-in-gitignore/

by Tomte • 4 years ago

655 231 4 years ago

groffee• 4 years ago

Yo dawg, I heard you like .gitignore, so we put a .gitignore in your .gitignore so you can .gitignore while you .gitignore.

neals• 4 years ago

Did you know that Pimp My Ride first aired in 2004. That is 18 years ago. A whole generation of now growns ups don't know the show.

sedeki• 4 years ago

I'm old enough to remember the show Pimp My Ride, but I don't recall Xzibit ever having that "catchphrase" on it.

DocTomoe• 4 years ago

I've seen reruns of that some three years ago. The new generation knows about the show, and shitty cars being made more shitty is timeless.

_fat_santa2• 4 years ago

I miss that show. It was so over the top and encapsulated it's own era so well.

hnthrway• 4 years ago

It's a meme now, don't worry, they know - I never watched the show myself

hooby• 4 years ago

the hen ate the egg

netsharc• 4 years ago

It's following the instructions to not track changes of that file, if he was expecting it to follow instructions to "treat as if this file isn't a configuration", he's excpecting wrong.

rpigab2• 4 years ago

This is my favourite feature of gitignores. Everytime I need "drafts", sample code, etc, in a repo, I create a folder in that repo, but then I have to remember to not add it to commits, and I don't want to add it to the .gitignore that is versioned, so I do "mkdir drafts && echo '*' > ./drafts/.gitignore", and it ignores my drafts without having to add a new ignored dir in the versioned .gitignores.

And obviously, it also "ignores" the .gitignore itself because it matches "*", while still taking it into account, which is what I need.

RupertWiser• 4 years ago

Do you know about .git/info/exclude? It only exists in your local git file so it isn’t shared with a remote repo and achieves this same purpose.

rpigab2• 4 years ago

I didn't! Good to know, even if my way is really quick and simple to set up so I might continue doing the same. Thanks!

Hamuko2• 4 years ago

I also (mis)used .gitignore before I realised that there was an easy way to ignore stuff that I have locally without having to commit/ignore a .gitignore file.

dfee• 4 years ago

Not at a term, but would this prevent `git clean -fdx` from removing the dir? That’d be quite useful!

Dobbs2• 4 years ago

Additionally git supports a global git ignore.

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

Then you can put all the standard things you want to ignore into it:

    $ cat ~/.gitignore
    .DS_Store
    ./drafts/
    *.swp

And it will apply to all git commands on your computer.

sph6• 4 years ago

I also got in my ~/.gitignore:

    .envrc   # direnv, where I store my local project configuration
    .vscode

and when I remember to use them:

    *.gitlocal
    *.gitlocal*

To store files and directories I don't ever want to push, mostly for scratch files and logs

p1necone• 4 years ago

This seems like it could potentially be a source of confusion - different devs on the same project would see different ignore behavior.

vbezhenar2• 4 years ago

Standard path is ~/.config/git/ignore

alexpls• 4 years ago

The global gitignore is super useful! I add a “.x” entry to it so that I can create scripts, drafts, etc in a “.x” folder in any of my projects.

Wrote more details about how I do this here: https://alexplescan.com/posts/2022/04/17/the-x-files/

gertlex2• 4 years ago

I've got a slightly different version of that last rule in mine:

    *.sw?

Since I'm messy enough to sometimes end up with multiple of them for a few files. (Also, not messing with flash files in git, or in general...)

But have since moved my vim swap files to ~/.vim/swap with `set directory=~/.vim/swap,.` in .vimrc.

chrisfinazzo2• 4 years ago

Hard agree. Even though I tend to work on only a couple of different kinds of things - at least for now - the global ignore file is a godsend.

So good.

tehbeard2• 4 years ago

I heavily advise AGAINST using this for anything apart from OS level file spam (.DS_Store etc).

We spent a good part of a day rebuilding a repo after a junior dev. left, when we found out they'd misused global gitignore and hadn't commited several important files due to an ignore they had set for a seperate project.

Lessons learnt. Ensure new devs don't use it, and code review on another machine than theirs...

mikl• 4 years ago

Or simply put the file at the default location for core.excludefile, which is

    ~/.config/git/ignore

on Unixy platforms.

pcthrowaway3• 4 years ago

I'm in the habit of just adding these things directly to .gitignore for repos which I'm a core contributor to.

Things like:

    drafts/
    backup/
    *.bak
    ignored/

etc.

I don't really see the downside to just adding them to the tracked gitignore. If other people have a different convention and want to add these files/paths for some reason, it's easily discoverable to them why the files can't be added, and then we can have a discussion about what naming conventions we want.

AndrewThrowaway2• 4 years ago

The only problem I can see it "leaking" some information?

"I see this guy has 'passwords/'" on his local machine, let's somehow sneakily merge new .gitignore to make them available publicly.

alex_smart7• 4 years ago

I mean this is only a problem if your commit work flow is "git add . && git commit".

A bad habit, in my opinion.

TowerTall• 4 years ago

This is what I do. Is there a "better" habit?

ekimekim3• 4 years ago

There is value in "making a decision" for each untracked file, of whether to explicitly add it or ignore it. This combines well with things like a PS1 that indicates if you have any unclean state (including both changes and untracked files). Every single time I find myself with an untracked file, I can either add it because I want it tracked, put it in .gitignore if it's something generated that I want my whole team to ignore, or put it in .git/info/exclude if it's something I've done locally that doesn't fit either of the above.

LinAGKar• 4 years ago

It also keeps them from polluting git status

sph6• 4 years ago

Disagree. How is that a bad habit? My workflow is "git status" to check what I've changed, "git add --all" and then "git commit".

"git status" needs to be clean. I don't want to see any untracked temporary files. If it's untracked either it needs to be ignored or it's a new source file to add to the index.

Keeping untracked files lying around not gitignored is a recipe for one day committing one by mistake, or conversely, that some of them are source files you've forgot to commit. I've seen both things from junior developers, that do not know of .gitignore.

AndrewThrowaway2• 4 years ago

I think this is quite genius, never thought about it before.

bhrgunatha• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing that idea. I'd simply never thought to do this and I'm adopting this in future.

The main drawback is something I do from time-to-time which is nuking and re-creating directories.

Deradon• 4 years ago

Another comment already mentioned the `.git/info/exclude` directory. For completeness link to the online docs: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

git will take 3 files into consideration for "ignoring" files:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore, $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, .gitignore

How I use them:

* ~/.gitignore: stuff I want to ignore everywhere (`/myNotes`, `.DS_STORE`, ...)

* <project>/.gitignore: stuff that should be ignore for this projects and shared with others

* <project>/.git/info/exclude; stuff for this project that only I want to ignore

** this is also super useful in combination with `git-bisect`

frays• 4 years ago

This is a fantastic tip, thanks!

rollcat2• 4 years ago

This is my strategy for dotfiles. My home directory has a .gitignore with "*" in it. I will "git add -f" any files I want tracked; git is extremely efficient at ignoring the rest. It doesn't require any frameworks, symlinks, installation scripts, elaborate tutorials/manpages, or any other voodoo.

To move in to a new machine - unfortunately you can't git clone into a non-empty directory, but the commands to work around that are simple enough to remember.

https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles

JoshTriplett• 4 years ago

I prefer to list individual directories and files in my ~/.gitignore so that I see when new files show up and I can decide whether to ignore them, commit them, or prevent them from getting generated.

jerrygoyal• 4 years ago

mkdir drafts && echo '' > ./drafts/.gitignore

thanks for the tip, is there a way to hide files at root level? I want to hide some .env. files

michaelsalim• 4 years ago

This is awesome! Will probably use this at some point. Thanks for sharing.

molszanski• 4 years ago

brilliant! Thank you!

Robin_Message• 4 years ago

.git/info/exclude is a local .gitignore file which is never committed which you can also use for this kind of purpose.

miskreant• 4 years ago

You can also add lines to `.git/info/exclude` for permanent, local only ignores for a specific repo.

thayne• 4 years ago

That's cool!

You can also put local gitignore rules in .git/info/exclude , but i have a hard time remembering that exact path for some reason.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Does what it says on the tin! Probably useful if you want a seperate dev-preferenced-specific gitignore in a subfolder. For example to ignore editor droppings for an editor that only you use.

rplnt• 4 years ago

Surprising? No. Under that same expectations untracked .gitignores wouldn't work either and we know that's not the case. But there are things that are both obvious once you know about them, but might not otherwise cross your mind. So this is definitely useful and informative.

martopix3• 4 years ago

There's a misunderstanding: "ignoring" means "not tracking as part of version control". But the author overloads the term "ignore" with "not look at it as a .gitignore configuration file".

wazari972• 4 years ago

exactly,

Therefore, we can see Git ignores .gitignore because its in .gitignore, which means it didn’t ignore .gitignore for instructions.
Is any of this informative, surprising, or useful? … Absolutely.

it's interesting to notice, but nothing surprising. git isn't supposed to ignore it for instructions

YPPH• 4 years ago

I'm willing to assume this is not a misunderstanding at all. It's either satirical or pointing out an effect which at first blush might seem counterintuitive. I found it amusing.

martopix3• 4 years ago

I would agree with you.

acatton4• 4 years ago

This is a recipe for disaster. Especially if somebody else commits a gitignore in your repository.

If you want an untracked list of files to not track, use .git/info/exclude, it's literally made for this. This is not a hidden feature, it is documented https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

rjmunro4• 4 years ago

If someone else commits a .gitignore in your repository, .gitignore is in your repository and will stay there. .gitignore is only used in deciding if an untracked file should be added. It makes no difference to existing files.

richardwhiuk• 4 years ago

You'll get a conflict when you try and pull I think.

acatton4• 4 years ago

If you do `echo .gitignore > .gitignore` and then somebody elses commit a git ignore, and you pull from that repository, your local .gitignore will be silently overriden, and you might add untracked files if you have the bad habit of `git commit -a`.

    $ for repo in alice bob; git init $repo
    $ git init --bare shared
    $ cd bob
    $ touch foo
    $ git add foo
    $ git commit -m "Initial commit"
    $ git push ../shared
    $ cd ../alice 
    $ git pull ../shared
    $ echo bar > .gitignore
    $ git add .gitignore 
    $ git commit -m "Add gitignore"
    $ git push ../shared
    $ cd ../bob
    $ echo .gitignore > .gitignore
    $ git pull ../shared
    remote: Enumerating objects: 4, done.
    remote: Counting objects: 100% (4/4), done.
    remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
    remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
    Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 272 bytes | 272.00 KiB/s, done.
    From ../shared
     * branch            HEAD       -> FETCH_HEAD
    Updating 343eb88..3701fae
    Fast-forward
     .gitignore | 1 +
     1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
     create mode 100644 .gitignore
    $ cat .gitignore
    bar

fbn79• 4 years ago

I was ignoring it!

shantnutiwari• 4 years ago

It's turtles all the way down :)

I just found out (from @RupertWiser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31420446) about the .git/info/exclude, I find that more interesting

zmmmmm2• 4 years ago

It's a good example of how subtle requirements can be and how unlikely it is you could get them right until people are actually using your software in real life.

junon10• 4 years ago

Are you implying this is a bug?

zmmmmm2• 4 years ago

the opposite : it's exactly how it should work, but how likely is it that someone sitting down to write requirements in advance would have managed to get this right? So many things obvious in hindsight are nearly impossible to anticipate up front.

tedk-42• 4 years ago

Git also ignores things you add into the `.git` folder (where your git history lives).

You can use that as a place to store things quickly rather than say, doing a stash.

tiborsaas• 4 years ago

Thanks, I hate that I know this now.

junon10• 4 years ago

Don't do this. It's a quick way to corrupt your repository.

pnt122• 4 years ago

When this happens, I usually create ./tmp/ and add it to .gitignore.

rjmunro4• 4 years ago

git couldn't take .gitignore into account when deciding to look at .gitignore, even if it wanted to, because it's not read .gitignore yet. It's like "Is 'No' the answer to this question?"

TobTobXX• 4 years ago

Git IS looking at it. It's just nod adding it or showing it in the status. There's a difference between reading/parsing and adding/committing.

vrocmod• 4 years ago

It vaguely reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox

brainwipe• 4 years ago

I'm delighted by this. I'm not entirely sure why but I am.

rubenerd2• 4 years ago

That made my morning, thanks :)

sudhirj• 4 years ago

Love it. Git obviously ignores the instructions on what to ignore that tell it to ignore instructions on what it ignore.

anshargal• 4 years ago

The following .gitignore is my favorite way to commit an (almost) empty folder to git:

  # Ignore everything in this directory 
  *
  # Except this file
  !.gitignore

.gitignore can be present in any directory and there is a way to unignore a wildcard

_fat_santa2• 4 years ago

I was looking at someone's dotfiles on Github a while back and they employed this method. Essentially they made their entire home directory a git repo but used gitignore to ignore everything but the dotfiles they wanted to backup. It was a pretty nifty setup

ansible• 4 years ago

I feel obligated to point out vcsh [1], which is likely already packaged for your operating system.

[1] https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

The main selling point is that you can set up various git repos for different things. I have one for SSH keys (and no, that does not get pushed anywhere except to my own private server), VIM, neovim, bash, and 'other' (for misc config files like .dir_colors, .gitconfig, etc.).

account422• 4 years ago

A nifty setup until you run a git command like `git clean -fx` somewhere under your home directory that you think is another git directory but isn't. Happy restore from backups time.

joboyx2• 4 years ago

Another option is to clone the dotfiles repo to your workspace. Then create symbolic links in your home directory. Like:

ln -fs ~/workspace/dotfiles/vimrc ~/.vimrc

einpoklum• 4 years ago

How much ignore would a git gitignore ignore if that gitignore was a git?

raghavtoshniwal• 4 years ago

pip uninstall pip also works, I found out the hard way.

danillonunes• 4 years ago

Ha! This is the tech savvy version of that gif where a old man drags the "my computer" icon to the trash and then see the computer disappearing in front of his eyes.

bin_bash• 4 years ago

This is exactly how I would expect it to work. It's just the title that's confusing.

gweinberg• 4 years ago

Yes. I interpreted the title to mean "If you put .gitnore in your.gitignore, the .gitignore stops working". And so I immediatly thought "that's wrong".

Why would anyone thing you wouldn't be able to put .gitignore in your .gitignore?

andrethegiant• 4 years ago

r/WordAvalanches

seba_dos1• 4 years ago

Is it actually surprising though? Doesn't seem to me, you quickly figure out in regular usage that it's not the committed content of this file that matters, and this is just a natural consequence.

wheybags• 4 years ago

Something I've always wanted from gitignore: a way to ignore changes to a file that is already present in the repo. So, for example, I can commit a config file that should contain secure credentials with the credentials redacted, and then ignore it so the credentials don't accidentally get pushed from someone's working dir.

For now what I do is ignore the config path and commit an "x.conf.example" file, but that is a bit more of a pain to use.

coder543• 4 years ago

I think the .conf.example approach is probably better, but the answer to your implied question is here: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-update-index

If you use --assume-unchanged on a file, then git will stop noticing changes at that point. I believe this only applies to your copy of the repo, though.

joboyx2• 4 years ago

i'm using Intellij, so for scenarios like this I create a separate "changelist" with name "LOCAL-ONLY" and include passwords and any local config that only applies to me.

That way I can clearly see that these changes don't get commited. You can also put line changes on the same file on different changelists.

Changelists concept is native with P4, but not sure with git. Maybe that's why Intellij only have it coz they've implemented their own on top of git.

chrisfinazzo2• 4 years ago

Yep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

account422• 4 years ago

Is any of this [...] surprising [...] … Absolutely.

Not at all - .gitignore is for ignoring working tree files in git operations, essentially it specifies which files are not part of the repository. It is not for disabling config files and I don't think why anyone would expect that. Putting .git in .gitignore also does not make git think there is no repo because why would it?

capitainenemo• 4 years ago

Kinda works w/ mercurial.

$ hg init foo

$ cd foo

$ echo ".hgignore" > .hgignore

$ hg st

$ rm .hgignore

$ touch .hgignore

$ hg st

? .hgignore

... apart from the ignored folder. Mercurial can't do that.

anderspitman• 4 years ago

I've considered (overuse of) .gitignore an antipattern for several years now. I've been bitten too many times by it hiding the differences between my local repo and someone else's.

With some projects that ignore build artifacts it's very difficult to know whether you've successfully performed a clean or not.

I don't see a problem with having a dirty repo. It makes it clear how the state of my local directory is different from what's in source control. Isn't that the whole point?

I'm sure I'm missing something, but so far I haven't missed .gitignore.

darau1• 4 years ago

In my experience, people tend to `git commit -am "nonsense"` no matter how many times I tell them not to. .gitignore at least ensures they don't add too much nonsense to the repository.

CGamesPlay2• 4 years ago

You can easily use git status --ignored for those cases where you really want to see all the cruft you’ve accumulated. Or you can make an alias to mask status and add that flag, then use git status --ignored=no when you don’t want the behavior.

hedora• 4 years ago

If it does, that's impressive.

Someone should generalize their approach to solve the halting problem.

mc4ndr3• 4 years ago

What working at several engie roles teaches you about git:

Don't expect people to know how to gitignore.

Or submodule.

Or tag.

Or interactive rebase.

Or squash.

Or branch.

But when you encounter a team that knows a thing or two, they git fascist and demand you re-enter the Jira ticket number three times in every commit message (in ALL CAPS).

monsterofcookie• 4 years ago

Only proves that devs are susceptible to dad humor.

rubenerd2• 4 years ago

Hi, author here. Yes this was just a bit of silly/pointless fun, though people overanalysing it here is just as delightful.

neycoda• 4 years ago

Git has to read .gitignore to get the instruction to ignore .gitignore, but since it's already read .gitignore, it can't go back and ignore .gitignore.

catskul2• 4 years ago

Why on earth is there a picture of a school girl in the upper right of the page?!

It feels creepy, and unprofessional. I've seen this sort of thing before and I really don't understand it.

Can anyone explain this phenomenon?

CRConrad• 4 years ago

[EDIT:] See https://rubenerd.com/about/#mascot and https://rubenerd.com/anime-restore-my-blog/ . Looks like a typical harmless Anime nerd to me. [/EDIT]

Not just any schoolgirl, but a schoolgirl drawn in "Manga"[1] or "Anime"[2] style, AFAICS. Lots of people are Manga and/or Anime fans, and many of those perhaps to such an extent that they feel it's a major part of their identity, so they want to show it some way. And a lot of those Japanese comics and animated films just happen to have young people of both sexes as their protagonists, so of course there will be schoolgirls in them. And much of that is, as I've understood it, "perfectly ordinary" comics and animations, like any "Young Adult" literature in Western culture; no more (explicitly) sexualised than Harry Potter or Star Wars.

So not necessarily "creepy", in the sense of sexualising schoolgirls... But yeah, from what (little) I understand of Japanese popular culture, sexualising schoolgirls is a pretty big part of current more-or-less accepted Japanese social mores, which is reflected in Manga and Anime too; see the whole phenomenon of "Hentai".[3] And I suppose there's a whole lot of Manga and Anime that is just titillating -- not quite explicitly, but borderline sexualised.

I have no idea about the proportions between the categories: I read quite a lot of Marvel and DC comics (and, ahem, some porn -- but those were wildly different things back then) in my youth, but that's so long ago that it was before the rise of Japanese popular culture phenomena in the West, so I've never been into any of that stuff. For all I know, the "creepy" stuff could be a majority of it; or it could be just a comparatively tiny fringe phenomenon.

So, summing up: Not necessarily creepy, but certainly gives at least me vibes of "potentially rather creepy". But, in the absence of any proof to the contrary, I guess I'd go with the guidelines and assume the best.

___

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime#Genres

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai (NSFW![4])

[4]: Well, depending.

comrad• 4 years ago

Well. It does what you told it to do, right?

Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore

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