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 (up to the top-level of the working
tree), with patterns in the higher level files 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.