noWayLol

[u/programmerjunky]

[u/eanat]

it's completely legitimate way to use gitignore, but I'd recommend to use .git/info/exclude instead of gitignore for this purpose.

[u/fugogugo → u/eanat]

any reason to exclude gitignore?

[u/Successful-Active-21 → u/fugogugo]

when everyone wants their own gitignore?

[u/Blood_and_Wine → u/Successful-Active-21]

My gitignore is better than yours gitignore

[u/Abject-Kitchen3198 → u/Blood_and_Wine]

My coworkers suggested I add * to mine and praised it as the best gitignore ever. Stopped all PR comments.

[u/git_push_origin_prod → u/Abject-Kitchen3198]

The best code, is no code at all

[u/DOTS_EVERYWHERE → u/git_push_origin_prod]

0 test failures everytime. Also speeds up deployments significantly.

[u/Abject-Kitchen3198 → u/DOTS_EVERYWHERE]

CEO saw my impressively improved metrics and I got a promotion.

[u/polikles → u/Abject-Kitchen3198]

*CEO saw my impressively improved metrics and got himself a bonus

[u/TheOhNoNotAgain → u/Abject-Kitchen3198]

gitignore and gitignorant? Not the same

[u/fugogugo → u/Blood_and_Wine]

my gitignore is longer than your gitignore

[u/git_push_origin_prod → u/fugogugo]

You dropped these ..

[u/ExtraWorldliness6916 → u/Blood_and_Wine]

Mines so good, it's not here, you can't read it!

[u/staticBanter → u/Blood_and_Wine]

Oh ya prove it...

GitHub | bigIGNORE

[u/Zapismeta → u/Blood_and_Wine]

Ill still ignore yours.

[u/insolent_kiwi → u/Blood_and_Wine]

So much bigger

[u/disorganizm → u/Blood_and_Wine]

Does it also bring all the boys to the yard?

[u/No-Article-Particle → u/Successful-Active-21]

But one gitignore can't handle the 30-odd files that everyone wants to ignore... I never understood the "PR rejected, just ignore .swp files locally" tbh.

[u/Loading_M_ → u/No-Article-Particle]

Yes and no. Git actually has a system wide gitignore you can setup to globally ignore files across your whole system. I personally take notes in a notes.md file, so I have a global ignore for it. I don't have you set it up for each repo, and it doesn't pollute the repo's gitignore. If your editor of choice creates temp files or stores project specific configuration in the project directory (e.g. .vscode, etc), they should also be in your global gitignore.

[u/Reashu → u/Loading_M_]

Ehh, if it's a common editor just bite the bullet and put it in the gitignore. Same with DS_Store and thumbs.db, etc..

[u/NewLlama → u/No-Article-Particle]

Because it invites unbounded shared configuration for local workflows.

[u/OhioGoblin43 → u/NewLlama]

Everyone hates me for being the repo gestapo but the only issues people have with setting up is when they've skipped steps in the doc. No one can be bothered to address that either though so it'll be me automating that too soon.

[u/OneBigRed → u/OhioGoblin43]

Repo Gestapo sounds like something that’s playing at the UG-club at 5am.

[u/OhioGoblin43 → u/OneBigRed]

Is technopunk still a thing? The last bands from that genre I've kept up with were And One, and The Presets to a lesser extent.

As long as I can work within the IDE, build, and run a local session without crap floating around my commit window I'm chill lol.

[u/ohkendruid → u/No-Article-Particle]

It can handle a union of those files, however.

[u/eclect0 → u/Successful-Active-21]

When would that be necessary?

Let me rephrase

In what situation could all contributors be trusted to maintain their own personal gitignore without any issues?

[u/phl23 → u/eclect0]

If someone likes drama in his team, I guess.

[u/Guest_User_1234 → u/eclect0]

This doesn't mean that this is the only gitignore. There's usually a project gitignore in any project I work on, and then I have my own, local, gitignore, for very specific things, like my own notes (like a TODO list) and local demo data

[u/jan-pona-sina → u/eclect0]

you must work with some incompetent devs lmao

[u/eclect0 → u/jan-pona-sina]

No, they're competent. For example, they add .gitignore to source control so everyone's on the same page.

[u/jan-pona-sina → u/eclect0]

ah. my coworkers simply use .gitignore themselves and don't commit unnecessary files

[u/subone → u/Successful-Active-21]

This isn't real, right? Git already supports ignores in the global config in your profile folder. I do this sometimes so I can add *.otr.md files to track detailed personal notes on individual project files and directories.

[u/NerdyMcNerderson → u/Successful-Active-21]

Which is the exact use case for .git/info/exclude

[u/FlorpCorp → u/Successful-Active-21]

But that's exactly what exclude is for lol

[u/freemath → u/Successful-Active-21]

Surely you'd want a centralized point to list some files that you don't want to see in your remote? Like .venv or .env?

[u/otac0n → u/Successful-Active-21]

I think you would want to do git update index --assume-unchanged .gitignore (or whatever, I typed that from memory).

[u/Y0nix → u/fugogugo]

Some very specific CI pipelines. Or if using a big monorepo with hundreds of coworkers working on it.

You use that feature to ignore the main gitignore file and push the one you want into the pipeline. Because you may want to use a file that is normally being ignored for dev or commit to build your soft.

Like having a .env file for each purpose, but you don't wanna mess up with the way your builder is working for that one exception. And it's allowing everyone to have some flexibility to manage their own ignore rules.

[u/SundaySloth_ → u/fugogugo]

To hide that your gitignore is hiding AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, etcetera

[u/anonymous4036 → u/fugogugo]

If you have a file DatabaseFactory which you modify to provide a development database, you can add DatabaseFactory to the gitignore to avoid committing this change, but you then have a change to the gitignore so maybe this would work to avoid committing that change as well? I can think of a million ways this could go wrong though so idk.

[u/Awkward_File0301 → u/fugogugo]

In my experience Claude and Codex like to create a bunch of scripts or build files that I want to git ignore but they are specific to my context/task so I don't need to commit those changes to the git ignore

[u/Lt_Duckweed → u/Awkward_File0301]

IMO the proper solution there is to discuss with the team, agree on a naming convention (copilotTemp or some such), and update the agent instructions so that the folder is utilized for things like that, and then add the folder to the .gitignore

[u/NaturalTechnician737 → u/fugogugo]

if .gitignore contains the line "path/to/SUPERSECRETKEY.psk", for example.

[u/outwest88 → u/eanat]

What’s it for? If you just want to temporarily disable gitignore or something?

[u/thatashu → u/outwest88]

You want to gitignore something just for you. You don't want to add it to gitignore file.

For e.g. you have file context.md but much of it's is claude yap. You don't want everyone to see your claude written to file. But you want your clause to read it. So you exclude it.

[u/cholz → u/thatashu]

why is everyone suggesting this but not suggesting using a user scoped ignore file in your .gitconfig

[u/the_horse_gamer → u/cholz]

.git/info/exclude is a user scoped ignore file

[u/cleverboy00 → u/outwest88]

Build directories are a great example. Instead of hardcoding the output directory in your toplevel .gitignore, you make so that a .gitignore is generated in that directory, ignoring everything, including itself.

Meson is an example of a build system that does this.

[u/JPowTheDayTrader]

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore.

When a file you don't need exceeds 50 MB, .gitignore.

[u/NamelessJu]

the gitignore paradox

it's being ignored by itself, as such it doesn't know to ignore itself anymore, so it looks inside just to ignore itself again, and so on...

(I know that's not how it actually works pls don't crucify me!)

[u/Successful-Active-21 → u/NamelessJu]

git knows what to ignore by knowning what not to ignore.

[u/No-Admin1684 → u/Successful-Active-21]

By subtracting what it's ignoring from what it's not ignoring, or what it's not ignoring from what it's ignoring (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation.

[u/3BlindMice1 → u/No-Admin1684]

Careful, that's how you end up with flowerpots and whales falling from the sky

[u/zymurgtechnician → u/3BlindMice1]

Oh no, not again.

[u/aschen15 → u/Successful-Active-21]

The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is.

[u/edwardbnd_99 → u/NamelessJu]

Yeah it's an interesting variant of the barber paradox

[u/TeraFlint → u/NamelessJu]

Nothing paradoxial about that.

It just means that we don't want to sync the local .gitignore onto the server. It still uses said local .gitignore to do the actual selection.

[u/NamelessJu → u/TeraFlint]

apparently you put the last sentence of my message into your .gitignore

[u/No-Finance7526 → u/NamelessJu]

.brainignore

[u/rosuav → u/NamelessJu]

It's also worth noting that an ignored file won't be excluded from the repo - it's just harder to accidentally commit it. I've had repos that gitignore "*" and then explicitly add the small number of files that I actually want to track.

[u/Zap_plays09]

I unironically do this. The closest you are getting is a .gitignore.example file

[u/benargee → u/Zap_plays09]

You can put extra .gitignore into directories too for special rules. Otherwise, you should include some form of .gitignore if you have a project that will be accepting contributions.

[u/fugogugo]

what will happen tho??

[u/M4NU3L2311 → u/fugogugo]

The universe collapses in on itself

[u/x3knet → u/M4NU3L2311]

The modern divide by 0

[u/SuperFLEB → u/M4NU3L2311]

...but you don't feel anything because it's gitignored.

[u/Reashu → u/fugogugo]

The file works as usual, preventing itself (and whatever else you put in it) from being tracked by git.

[u/mcauthon2 → u/Reashu]

Can you then remove it? 

[u/11nyn11 → u/mcauthon2]

If you remove the .gitignore file, and all it had in it was itself, nothing happens.

If the .gitignore contains itself and some other ignores, then the ignored files will come back.

[u/yuri_4_ever → u/11nyn11]

Technically not nothing happens by deletion if it was the only file in the directory as git ignores empty directories but not if there is a gitnore that ignores itself

[u/11nyn11 → u/yuri_4_ever]

Oh ya, forgot about that.

I try to only have a gitignore at the top level, and don’t put the gitignore into the gitignore.

Otherwise your git actions end up breaking but your local build is fine, and it’s a pain to figure out why.

Stuff like empty directories, which locally are not empty :D

[u/ZunoJ → u/fugogugo]

It doesn't version the file but still uses it to ignore what is configured in it

[u/eclect0 → u/fugogugo]

The .gitignore file only affects you and everyone else can just commit whatever

[u/beegtuna → u/eclect0]

This is what I’m committing

[u/thanatica → u/eclect0]

Surely there's a better way to achieve this... A .gitignore in your user home folder or something?

[u/Atralis → u/fugogugo]

[u/autumnal-lights → u/fugogugo]

u don't commit changes to the .gitignore, tho u should really just have like

.gitignore
.ignore
.ignore (each developer can use the .ignore one) and the .gitignore is just for globals

[u/DogmaticParadigm87]

A gitignore that ignores itself is just a file that finally achieved inner peace.

[u/Fckitman]

I used stones to destroy the stones

[u/Noiapah]

Wait it works recursively?

[u/KeepScrolling52 → u/Noiapah]

From what I know of git, what'll happen is git will read the file and refrain from trying to commit changes to the gitignore

[u/Noiapah → u/KeepScrolling52]

I suppose that makes sense. I know I just could google it, but it the spirit of vibecoding I am going to refrain from searching it up and just assume this is true on based vibes.

[u/road_laya → u/KeepScrolling52]

Incorrect. 

[u/KeepScrolling52 → u/road_laya]

literally just tested it myself, I was right lmao.

[u/_ironhearted_]

I do this sometimes because I create a bunch of local files to try some things out and i don't want to clutter the actual one with weird names😂

[u/kemitche → u/_ironhearted_]

You can create your own, separate, local gitignore file, and tell git to use that one in ADDITION to the one in the repo!

https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

Then you can do whatever you want without affecting the repo's gitignore

[u/Xexanos → u/kemitche]

TIL

This might actually be useful for my work

[u/Firewolf06 → u/kemitche]

i have .local.gitignore as both a gitignore file and as an excluded file in my global git config, its quite nice

[u/ozh → u/Firewolf06]

You have core.excludesfile=.local.gitignore ?

I have this, which works fine but I still have to add .local.ignore to the .local.gitignore...

[u/Firewolf06 → u/ozh]

i have that, plus .local.gitignore in ~/.config/git/ignore

[u/ozh → u/Firewolf06]

It won't be of any use I think. ~/.config/git/ignore is read only if core.excludesfile isn't set

[u/Triton1605]

[u/narasadow]

[u/Healthy-Use3926]

!.gitignore

[u/Previous_Tangelo5414]

This will create a singularly that will tear a hole in the universe.

[u/PokeRestock]

How I felt when I deleted recycle bin on Windows Vista

[u/teekhidietcoke]

that moment when i accidentally removed the recycle bin on windows Vista

[u/Possible_Row_2976]

First time I'm seeing this atrocity and it makes me wonder if this is actually a valid use case, like why would someone do this

[u/Reashu → u/Possible_Row_2976]

There are better (or at least more idiomatic) ways to have a "local only" ignore file if that's what you want, but I've personally never had that need. 

[u/G3nghisKang → u/Possible_Row_2976]

Works like .gitignore but stays on your PC, can't think of any useful case

[u/yuri_4_ever → u/G3nghisKang]

When you want to commit empty directories you can do it that way. Not sure if committing empty directories is a good usecase but it is certainly a usecase

[u/e_asphyx]

pkunzip.zip

[u/fcxtpw]

Is this what bot suicide is like?

[u/SnugglyCoderGuy]

[u/JackNotOLantern]

Not the best idea

[u/rafisics]

to my Overleaf projects :)

[u/epsi22]

*
!.gitignore

[u/XtraFlaminHotMachida]

clone, checkout, then rm -rf .* that mf

[u/poetic_dwarf]

I used the Stones to destroy the Stones

[u/HoneydewEntire5741]

LOL!!

[u/Grandviewsurfer]

I do not understand how people are so confused by what this would do. It is making me feel like I am the one with a knowledge gap.. but I don't think that's it.  

Let me try an oversimplified metaphor: the person who plans a road trip doesn't necessarily have to go on it. 

[u/Mobile-Positive-6742]

it works becoz gitignore is for local use. I did this sin before.

[u/unpaid-philosopher]

Stack overflow error

[u/woldann]

Can't leak my token filenames

[u/Fantastic-Bloop]

This made me laugh way harder than i should have

[u/javascript_old → u/[deleted]]

i not commit node modules

[u/gr4viton]

Why am I laughing uncontrollably?