NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | PATTERN FORMAT | NOTES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON

GITIGNORE(5)                     Git Manual                     GITIGNORE(5)

NAME         top

       gitignore - Specifies intentionally untracked files to ignore

SYNOPSIS         top

       $HOME/.config/git/ignore, $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, .gitignore

DESCRIPTION         top

       A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git
       should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the
       NOTES below for details.
       Each line in a gitignore file specifies a pattern. When deciding
       whether to ignore a path, Git normally checks gitignore patterns from
       multiple sources, with the following order of precedence, from
       highest to lowest (within one level of precedence, the last matching
       pattern decides the outcome):
       ·   Patterns read from the command line for those commands that
           support them.
       ·   Patterns read from a .gitignore file in the same directory as the
           path, or in any parent directory, with patterns in the higher
           level files (up to the toplevel of the work tree) being
           overridden by those in lower level files down to the directory
           containing the file. These patterns match relative to the
           location of the .gitignore file. A project normally includes such
           .gitignore files in its repository, containing patterns for files
           generated as part of the project build.
       ·   Patterns read from $GIT_DIR/info/exclude.
       ·   Patterns read from the file specified by the configuration
           variable core.excludesFile.
       Which file to place a pattern in depends on how the pattern is meant
       to be used.
       ·   Patterns which should be version-controlled and distributed to
           other repositories via clone (i.e., files that all developers
           will want to ignore) should go into a .gitignore file.
       ·   Patterns which are specific to a particular repository but which
           do not need to be shared with other related repositories (e.g.,
           auxiliary files that live inside the repository but are specific
           to one user’s workflow) should go into the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude
           file.
       ·   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. Its default value
           is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not
           set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used instead.
       The underlying Git plumbing tools, such as git ls-files and git
       read-tree, read gitignore patterns specified by command-line options,
       or from files specified by command-line options. Higher-level Git
       tools, such as git status and git add, use patterns from the sources
       specified above.

PATTERN FORMAT         top

       ·   A blank line matches no files, so it can serve as a separator for
           readability.
       ·   A line starting with # serves as a comment. Put a backslash ("\")
           in front of the first hash for patterns that begin with a hash.
       ·   Trailing spaces are ignored unless they are quoted with backslash
           ("\").
       ·   An optional prefix "!" which negates the pattern; any matching
           file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again.
           It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of
           that file is excluded. Git doesn’t list excluded directories for
           performance reasons, so any patterns on contained files have no
           effect, no matter where they are defined. Put a backslash ("\")
           in front of the first "!" for patterns that begin with a literal
           "!", for example, "\!important!.txt".
       ·   If the pattern ends with a slash, it is removed for the purpose
           of the following description, but it would only find a match with
           a directory. In other words, foo/ will match a directory foo and
           paths underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a
           symbolic link foo (this is consistent with the way how pathspec
           works in general in Git).
       ·   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".
       ·   A leading slash matches the beginning of the pathname. For
           example, "/*.c" matches "cat-file.c" but not
           "mozilla-sha1/sha1.c".
       Two consecutive asterisks ("**") in patterns matched against full
       pathname may have special meaning:
       ·   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".
       ·   A trailing "/**" matches everything inside. For example, "abc/**"
           matches all files inside directory "abc", relative to the
           location of the .gitignore file, with infinite depth.
       ·   A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks then a slash
           matches zero or more directories. For example, "a/**/b" matches
           "a/b", "a/x/b", "a/x/y/b" and so on.
       ·   Other consecutive asterisks are considered invalid.

NOTES         top

       The purpose of gitignore files is to ensure that certain files not
       tracked by Git remain untracked.
       To stop tracking a file that is currently tracked, use git rm
       --cached.

EXAMPLES         top

               $ git status
               [...]
               # Untracked files:
               [...]
               #       Documentation/foo.html
               #       Documentation/gitignore.html
               #       file.o
               #       lib.a
               #       src/internal.o
               [...]
               $ cat .git/info/exclude
               # ignore objects and archives, anywhere in the tree.
               *.[oa]
               $ cat Documentation/.gitignore
               # ignore generated html files,
               *.html
               # except foo.html which is maintained by hand
               !foo.html
               $ git status
               [...]
               # Untracked files:
               [...]
               #       Documentation/foo.html
               [...]
       Another example:
               $ cat .gitignore
               vmlinux*
               $ ls arch/foo/kernel/vm*
               arch/foo/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
               $ echo '!/vmlinux*' >arch/foo/kernel/.gitignore
       The second .gitignore prevents Git from ignoring
       arch/foo/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S.
       Example to exclude everything except a specific directory foo/bar
       (note the /* - without the slash, the wildcard would also exclude
       everything within foo/bar):
               $ cat .gitignore
               # exclude everything except directory foo/bar
               /*
               !/foo
               /foo/*
               !/foo/bar

SEE ALSO         top

       git-rm(1), gitrepository-layout(5), git-check-ignore(1)

GIT         top

       Part of the git(1) suite

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control system)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual page,
       see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on
       2017-07-05.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
       sion of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date
       source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original man‐
       ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.9.2.277.g2949358           07/16/2016                     GITIGNORE(5)

Pages that refer to this page: git-add(1)git-check-ignore(1)git-clean(1)git-commit(1)git-commit-tree(1)git-config(1)git-init(1)git-log(1)git-ls-files(1)git-read-tree(1)git-show(1)git-status(1)gitattributes(5)gitrepository-layout(5)