Setup rules for ignoring files and directories

7.1. Creating a .gitignore file for your repository

Git can be configured to ignore certain files and directories. This is configured in a .gitignore file. This file can be in any directory and can contain patterns for files.
You can use certain wildcards in this file. * matches several characters. The ? parameter matches one character. More patterns are possible and described under the following URL: gitignore manpage
For example, the following .gitignore file tells Git to ignore the bin and target directories and all files ending with a ~.

# ignore all bin directories
# matches "bin" in any subfolder
bin/

# ignore all target directories
target/

# ignore all files ending with ~
*~ 

You can create the .gitignore file in the root directory of the working tree to make it specific for the Git repository.

Note

Files that are committed to the Git repository are not automatically removed if you add them to a .gitignore file. You can use the git rm -r --cached [filename] command to remove existing files from a Git repository.

Tip

The .gitignore file tells Git to ignore the specified files in Git commands. You can still add ignored files to the staging area of the Git repository by using the --force parameter, i.e. with the git add --force [filename] command.
This is useful if you want to add, for example, auto-generated binaries, but you need to have a fine control about the version which is added and want to exclude them from the normal workflow.

7.2. Global (cross-repository) .gitignore settings

You can also setup a global .gitignore file valid for all Git repositories via the core.excludesfile setting. The setup of this setting is demonstrated in the following code snippet.

# Create a ~/.gitignore in your user directory
cd ~/
touch .gitignore

# Exclude bin and .metadata directories
echo "bin" >> .gitignore
echo ".metadata" >> .gitignore
echo "*~" >> .gitignore
echo "target/" >> .gitignore

# Configure Git to use this file
# as global .gitignore

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore 

The local .gitignore file can be committed into the Git repository and therefore is visible to everyone who clones the repository. The global .gitignore file is only locally visible.

7.3. Local per-repository ignore rules

You can also create local per-repository rules by editing the .git/info/exclude file in your repository. These rules are not committed with the repository so they are not shared with others.
This allows you to exclude, for example, locally generated files.