How to setup .gitignore for Windows?

Question

I am setting up my first project in Git. How do I setup git-ignore file in Windows?

I am creating my first Rails project using Vagrant and trying to configure .gitignore in Windows

Answer 1

It seems that for ignoring files and directories there are two main ways:

.gitignore

• Placing .gitignore file into the root of your repo besides .git folder (in Windows make sure you see the true file extension and then make .gitignore.

• Making global configuration %HOMEPATH%\.gitignore_global and running

  git config --global core.excludesfile %HOMEPATH%\.gitignore_global to add this to your git config.

Note: files tracked before can be untracked by running git rm --cached filename. This absolutely critical for repos that existed BEFORE you created the .gitignore

Repo exclude

For local files that doesn't need to be shared, you just add file pattern or directory to file .git\info\exclude. These rules are not committed, so are not seen by other collaborators in your project. These are machine specific configs.

Answer 2

Windows does not allow you to create a "dotfile" (i.e., a file whose name begins with a dot). There are three simple ways to create a .gitignore in Windows, though. In each case, you want the .gitignore in your project's root directory.

1. In your text editor, create a file and "Save" or "Save As". Name the file ".gitignore" and the text editor works around the OS's limitation. I use Sublime Text 3 and Vim. This method works for both (Vim would use the command :w, though).

2. A fallback would be to create an empty (for now) text file and save it as .gitignore.txt then go into the command shell and rename the file to .gitignore (using the command line). That will do it.

3. Git Bash (available in the git installer for Windows) has the "touch" command and it will create dotfiles. At the Git Bash prompt enter the command "touch .gitignore" and an empty file is created if no file existed with that name.

Add your exclusion rules inside the .gitignore file:

1. Starting point. This repo will give you sample exclusion patterns for (i) Windows, (ii) Rails and (iii) Vagrant. You could add those to a global gitignore file.
2. GitIgnore / Patterns. This section of the Git Manual explains the patterns to use in your new gitignore file. Basically, you exclude directories and files that don't need version control.

Answer 3

To add to previous answers that you should use a text editor to create the .gitignore file, I usually first run dir > .gitignore from a Windows command prompt or Powershell window.

This outputs the entire directory listing to a file named .gitignore .

Then it's very easy to use a text editor (e.g., Notepad ++ or Atom) to modify the file from the directory listing and not miss a file or mistype a file name.

Answer 4

For Windows 10 I used:

ls > .gitignore

to create a clean .gitignore file ready to just delete lines where using 'dir' I would have had to also edit out all the explanatory directory text. I needed this when vscode told me I had 5K changes after I added a virtual environment to an existing project.