Ignore .pyc files in git repository

Question

You should add a line with:

*.pyc 

to the .gitignore file in the root folder of your git repository tree right after repository initialization.

As ralphtheninja said, if you forgot to to do it beforehand, if you just add the line to the .gitignore file, all previously committed .pyc files will still be tracked, so you'll need to remove them from the repository.

If you are on a Linux system (or "parents&sons" like a MacOSX), you can quickly do it with just this one line command that you need to execute from the root of the repository:

find . -name "*.pyc" -exec git rm -f "{}" \;

This just means:

starting from the directory i'm currently in, find all files whose name ends with extension .pyc, and pass file name to the command git rm -f

After *.pyc files deletion from git as tracked files, commit this change to the repository, and then you can finally add the *.pyc line to the .gitignore file.

(adapted from http://yuji.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/git-remove-all-pyc/)

You have probably added them to the repository before putting *.pyc in .gitignore.
First remove them from the repository.

Put it in .gitignore. But from the gitignore(5) man page:

  ·   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".

So, either specify the full path to the appropriate *.pyc entry, or put it in a .gitignore file in any of the directories leading from the repository root (inclusive).

If you want to ignore '.pyc' files globally (i.e. if you do not want to add the line to .gitignore file in every git directory), try the following:

$ cat ~/.gitconfig 
[core]
    excludesFile = ~/.gitignore
$ cat ~/.gitignore
**/*.pyc

[Reference]
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

• 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.

• 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".