Stop Using Git Ignore

https://eddiejaoude.substack.com/p/you-must-use-your-global-git-ignore

by eddiejaoude • 2 years ago

14 69 2 years ago

eddiejaoude.substack.com

You'd still need a repository .gitignore, more-so if you're not working in a professional development shop (i.e., SMB/enterprise IT) or open source project.

There don't seem to be any downsides to a long .gitignore. Who cares if it is 100 or 1000 lines?

Kind of pointless, in my view. I think a user-global .gitignore is fine to have to make sure you don't make mistakes for net-new projects or projects where someone forgot to add your exclusions, but otherwise, you're going to need both if you choose to use a user-global.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

yes we still need the repo git ignore for specific items for the repo

it was more about stop using the repo git ignore for everything, rather than not use it at all

littlestymaar6• 2 years ago

Yeah, people putting MacOS-specific files that have no relation to the codebase in the .gitignore should stop.

WCSTombs3• 2 years ago

Yeah, the article's point is also that you need both:

The contents of the repo’s git ignore is for the project only files and folders. Developers can customise their own global git ignore with extra exclusions they need.

The two gitignores are for different purposes. The user-specific gitignore (~/.gitignore, or ~/.config/git/ignore) is tailored to the developer's specific workflow and preferred tools, so for example, a Vim user would have different rules from an Emacs or VSCode user.

The project-level gitignore(s) are for build products. For example, if the project's build scripts create a "build" directory for all the build products, "build/" would probably be in the project's .gitignore.

It doesn't make sense to put editor-specific stuff in the project's .gitignore because the editor or IDE a contributor chooses to use to develop the project is orthogonal to the code in the project.

nullindividual2• 2 years ago

It doesn't make sense to put editor-specific stuff in the project's .gitignore because the editor or IDE a contributor chooses to use to develop the project is orthogonal to the code in the project.

Why not? What's the harm?

There seems to be zero significant downsides to include editor or operating system-specific patterns in the project .gitignore. A long .gitignore doesn't cause performance issues.

To wit, you'll ultimately have someone without a global .gitignore that will lead to PR cleanup (or worse, direct commits).

The project level .gitignore prevents mistakes by all committers. This is superior to trusting a developer correctly set up their own .gitignore.

I think this is getting to the level of "optimization" because it feels good rather than doing any true good.

forrestthewoods3• 2 years ago

Disagree.

Many projects may want to commit IDE files. Ignoring them globally is simply wrong.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

oh wow, really! why? sounds like a horrible project, imagine those git conflicts

can you elaborate on why they would want to commit IDE generated files? I have only seen this in legacy projects

what happens if people want to use different IDEs?

Retr0id• 2 years ago

IDE-specific files aren't necessarily auto-generated. They might include project-specific configs (random examples that come to mind include linter configs, tab/space indent settings, C library include paths)

S04dKHzrKT• 2 years ago

Jetbrains' .DotSettings file is a specific example. It contains things like project specific dictionaries for the IDE's spell checker.

forrestthewoods3• 2 years ago

imagine those git conflicts

Not an issue

why they would want to commit IDE generated files

You added the word generated.

Many Windows-oriented projects a Visual Studio .sln file. This is great! You can open the sln, build, and run. It “just works”. Very nice. I wish more projects did this.

what happens if people want to use different IDEs?

That’s fine. Nothing stopping it.

WCSTombs3• 2 years ago

Once they're committed into the repository, they're no longer ignored, so what's the problem? The IDE files being listed in a hypothetical developer's global .gitignore do no harm in this case.

forrestthewoods3• 2 years ago

I utterly fucking despise that Git allows ignored files in some cases. FUCKING DESPISE.

IMHO the .gitignore should be the source of truth.

efilife2• 2 years ago

Problems listed in the article:

Everyone uses different operating systems, IDEs and dev tools.

How is this related to .gitignore?

This list will only keep growing, it will never end

Where's the problem? A random Facebook's repo has its gitignore file weigh 2KB[0]. Is this a problem?

Is the “.gitignore” file competing with the “README.md” for the most updated file in the git repo? I hope not

Again, why is this a bad thing?

The author just wanted to rant about something but didn't know about what

*[0] https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/blob/main/.giti...

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

I don't like to rant, I like to have professional discussions.

Than you for reading the article and for sharing the FB link with a git ignore example - the contents of the example file is not long because it doesn't have every dev tool possible, so I think you proved my point - so thank you :)

efilife2• 2 years ago

Can you answer the questions?

gwynforthewyn2• 2 years ago

Being honest, I dislike the tone of this sort of clickbaity rephrasing of the article title. The actual title is "You must use your Global Git Ignore!" which is completely true; the nuanced observation from the article "Using the git ignore feature is great but it has limitations, which is why I think this file is overused and often incorrectly" is a worthwhile hook, and presented thoughtfully.

The title "Stop Using Git Ignore", which the author of the blog post chose for this submission, doesn't represent his actual article well, though it probably gets more upvotes on Hacker News. I wish he'd presented the article more accurately, as it's a worthwhile observation that, for example, we probably have so many .DS_Store files and .vscode/.idea directories that defining them once will save us some hassle.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

Thank you for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate you taking the time and effort.

Yes the title is a little bit controversial

gwynforthewyn2• 2 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to write the article! We need more people sharing their good ideas like this.

phatskat• 2 years ago

It’s more than “a little bit controversial”, it _is_ clickbait. If your title was more true to the article’s actual premise, I doubt you’d have as much engagement. The title made me click immediately because “wow that’s a wild opinion!” I opened the article and was greeted with a much more nuanced view than I was led to believe and tbh I likely wouldn’t have read it if the title was more accurate.

wobblyasp• 2 years ago

I'd rather enforce it at the repo then hope and pray everyone updates their global configs.

Easy enough to catch but you'll miss some. Literally no cost to adding it to repo config either

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

yes as an open source maintainer, this is a difficult decision I need to make for each project. On one hand, I want to do the right thing, but on the other, the initial convenience does come into play - but this can come back to bite us later when people play the green square game on the git ignore file in the GitHub repo

yodon• 2 years ago

Everyone is free to pick a proverbial hill to die on.

Some focus on battles they are likely to win, others on battles they are bound to lose.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

not sure what you mean by this, can you explain more?

dvt• 2 years ago

This seems like a terrible idea.. imagine framework A that has a throwaway folder called ".blah"—now imagine framework B that has a very important configuration folder called ".blah"—so at best this would only cover IDE and OS stuff. But that stuff ends up being like what, 10 lines at most?

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

I am suggesting we separate project specific and developer specific git ignores - I don't think you read the article

vegetablepotpie• 2 years ago

Using a user gitignore file works if you’re responsible for your development environment. This does not work for other developers who are not responsible for their development environment.

The first place to catch errant build files and artifacts from entering the repo database is the .gitignore file. The second place to catch them is the PR. The .gitignore prevents repetitive file adds from entering the PR.

What I don’t want to see in an enterprise environment is someone checking in a 100MB binary file that gets checked into dev because the team was busy and approved a PR hastily. What would be helpful is a git hook that checks the mime type of a file and decide if it should even by a type of file that should be checked into a project.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

thank you for your detailed replied. The Git hook is an interesting idea, I use Git Husky for git hooks, and checking the mime type could be good to avoid files like screenshots being committed

I will look into this idea. Thanks again

hbogert• 2 years ago

not sure I agree with the article or not, just wanted to state there's a third option: you can define your ignore rules per project but not necessarily share the, by putting the ignore rules in:

  .git/info/exclude

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

Oh interesting 3rd option! Thank you for sharing, I will explore the practically side to this option and feedback. Thank you!

Lws803• 2 years ago

Ignoring .env files globally could prevent some mistakes.. :D

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

yes exactly

htk2• 2 years ago

Let's hope that people who resort to clickbait titles never complain about dark patterns in software, because what they do is analogous, they're tricking me to their advantage.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

Sorry you thought it was a trick, I guess I could have extended the title with

"...for your personal files"

htk2• 2 years ago

Thank you for the reply. I believe you have interesting enough material to not need to resort to controversial titles. Keep writing, it'll only get better.

default-kramer4• 2 years ago

As a maintainer, don’t fall into the trap of putting every possible exclusion into the repo’s git ignore. This really is a “sticky plaster” approach in my view. What we should try to do is up-skill and educate the community, so it benefits everyone in the long run.

Strong disagree. Please do continue trying to educate the community, but that's no reason to take the guardrails off.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

Thank you for reading and commenting. It is great to understand different people's perspectives.

From my experience the main downside of keeping the "guardrails on", people are less likely to learn about the importance of git global ignore and also with open source projects there can be a green square chasing game (which we also need to educate people on) - just thinking about this, more Pull Requests will come in with unwanted files though, which will be painful for contributors and maintainers, but could be a good lesson?

default-kramer4• 2 years ago

You've mentioned the "green square game" a lot, and I don't see how this is a problem. If someone makes a PR that is nothing but the .gitignore file, you can just reject it in one second. (Unless it is a well-researched and well-justified change, in which case you can gratefully merge it.)

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I think most people are aware of the repo’s git ignore file

Not me, never heard of it.

I use ./.git/info/exclude to bypass commits and pushes, that is good enough for me.

Quickly reading the title, I though it was about stop using git period, go to something else :)

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

Interesting to hear about your workflow! Someone else mentioned "./.git/info/exclude". It is something I will look in to and ask around to see who else uses it. Thanks for your comment

ghusto• 2 years ago

This is bad advice. The repo’s ignore file is there so that other people (without certain domain knowledge) don’t accidentally commit undesirable files, including directories containing sensitive information (which get generated by some tools like Terraform).

Use the repo’s ignore, not your own.

default-kramer4• 2 years ago

Exactly, sometimes it takes me some minutes of research to determine whether a certain file should be ignored or not. In that situation, it's very appropriate to put that in the repo's gitignore, preferably with comments explaining why the pattern is included/excluded.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

good point, comments are super important

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

I don't think you read the article, there is a video at the end if you prefer.

Yes we should use git ignore for the repo specific items, so if the repo has terraform it should ignore generated files - but not desktop tools people use as we all use different dev tools

default-kramer4• 2 years ago

Examples of folders included in the git ignore file are generated files like “.next” from NextJS or “test-results” from Playwright. These will be generated for every developer on the project regardless of their OS, IDE etc.
Yes I am saying this is wrong… (let me know if you agree/disagree below)

I didn't realize that the first paragraph is saying "This is good"; I thought the second paragraph was saying that the first paragraph is bad.

TrianguloY• 2 years ago

Just a quick mention to remind that .gitignore files can be placed in any folder/subfolder inside a repository, and they will refer to folders inside itself only. The global .gitignore should be used for global rules and root folders, but if you have path with more than one folder on it, you may want to add it to a .gitignore inside that subfolder itself.

Almost mandatory for monorepos too!

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

Great point! Thank you for adding that, yes it works for sub folders also, which makes sense especially for mono repos

I really appreciate you adding value to the conversation, thank you!

kennu2• 2 years ago

It would be very inconvenient to try to synchronize global gitignore settings to all my computers and development environments. When .gitignore files are part of the project, they are automatically distributed everywhere where they are needed.

eddiejaoude23• 2 years ago

they are automatically distributed everywhere where they are needed

for you and your tools, but what about everyone else?

Look at using dotfiles to sync your computer's config to multiple computers, it is a great tool

kennu2• 2 years ago

Other people working on the project add their ignored files to the same .gitignore. No problem.

Stop Using Git Ignore

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