Ignoring Things
How to Ignore Things
How to ignore things
What if we have files that we do not want Git to track for us, like backup files created by our editor or intermediate files created during data analysis? Let’s create a few dummy files:
and see what Git says:
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Putting these files under version control would be a waste of disk space. What’s worse, having them all listed could distract us from changes that actually matter, so let’s tell Git to ignore them.
We do this by creating a file in the root directory of our project called .gitignore:
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These patterns tell Git to ignore any file whose name ends in .dat and everything in the results directory. (If any of these files were already being tracked, Git would continue to track them.)
Once we have created this file, the output of git status is much cleaner:
Output
The only thing Git notices now is the newly-created .gitignore file. You might think we wouldn’t want to track it, but everyone we’re sharing our repository with will probably want to ignore the same things that we’re ignoring. Let’s add and commit .gitignore:
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As a bonus, using .gitignore helps us avoid accidentally adding files to the repository that we don’t want to track:
Output
The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files: a.dat Use -f if you really want to add them. fatal: no files added
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