Is there an ignore command for git like there is for svn?

Question

There is no special git ignore command.

Edit a .gitignore file located in the appropriate place within the working copy. You should then add this .gitignore and commit it. Everyone who clones that repo will than have those files ignored.

Note that only file names starting with / will be relative to the directory .gitignore resides in. Everything else will match files in whatever subdirectory.

You can also edit .git/info/exclude to ignore specific files just in that one working copy. The .git/info/exclude file will not be committed, and will thus only apply locally in this one working copy.

You can also set up a global file with patterns to ignore with git config --global core.excludesfile. This will locally apply to all git working copies on the same user's account.

Run git help gitignore and read the text for the details.

A very useful git ignore command comes with the awesome tj/git-extras.

Here are a few usage examples:

List all currently ignored patterns

git ignore

Add a pattern

git ignore "*.log"

Add one of the templates from gitignore.io

git ignore-io -a rails

git-extras provides many more useful commands. Definitely worth trying out.

On Linux/Unix, you can append files to the .gitignore file with the echo command. For example if you want to ignore all .svn folders, run this from the root of the project:

echo .svn/ >> .gitignore

You have two ways of ignoring files:

• .gitignore in any folder will ignore the files as specified in the file for that folder. Using wildcards is possible.
• .git/info/exclude holds the global ignore pattern, similar to the global-ignores in subversions configuration file.

I hope it's not too late.

If you are on Windows you can just do the following to create a .gitignore file

echo name_of_the_file_you_want_to_ignore.extension > .gitignore

In order to edit .gitignore you can run

notepad .gitignore

Create a file named .gitignore on the root of your repository. In this file you put the relative path to each file you wish to ignore in a single line. You can use the * wildcard.

It's useful to define a complete .gitignore file for your project. The reward is safe use of the convenient --all or -a flag to commands like add and commit.

Also, consider defining a global ~/.gitignore file for commonly ignored patterns such as *~, which covers temporary files created by Emacs.