What should I put in a meteor .gitignore file?

Question

The only directory you want excluded from version control is .meteor/local.

Meteor automatically creates the right .meteor and .meteor/.gitignore, though -- you shouldn't need to do anything.

You might want to put any configuration settings files in there if you are pushing to a public repos.

I store any security sensitive data configuration settings like encryption keys and various passwords for services like smtp, twitter, facebook and others in a config.js and then put that in .gitignore or in the info/exclude file. Stuff I don't want in a public repo.

Just an additional suggestion to consider for your .gitignore

Your gitignore should also contain:

public/node_modules

And you supplement this with a properly crafted package.json that manages node module dependency installation.

This will necessitate a npm install when installed somewhere new.

According to this article, you should ignore your settings.json, especially if you have environment specific information to include API keys.

With meteor 1.3 you want to also ignore node_modules. There is no reason to have all of the libraries added to git because you can install them through npm. The node_modules folder most likely is larger than your app (excluding the .meteor/local folder)