A few weeks ago I told Bart off the air that when he was done with his mini-series within a series all about the version control system Git, I’d like a few minutes with him offline so he could explain how to ignore files in Git. I knew there was a way to do it but he hadn’t covered it so I assumed it was just something quick he could explain to me. His reaction surprised me, he said, “D’oh!” because he realized that this is a very important part of using Git and that he would definitely dedicate an installment to it.
So this week Bart teaches us how to use .gitignore to tell Git not to track changes to files and folders. He explains that there are files your computer or even your code editor may be creating that you don’t want Git to track, and of course there all of the dummy test files we as humans create that would not be something we’d want to share with our co-workers or fellow open source contributors.
I was nervous about using git ignore because I understood it relied on patterns, and I thought that would mean something along the lines of using Regular Expressions, which are kind of daunting. I shouldn’t have been worried, .gitignore patterns definitely don’t require any heavy lifting.
I was really looking forward to this installment and it didn’t disappoint.
You can find Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/…