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Elijah Miller

03 Feb 2009

Global Git Ignore

OS X has this file that creeps into any directory you browse called .DS_Store. All too often this file will accidentally get committed to a repository.

Every time I setup a new git project, I end up adding .DS_Store to the .gitignore file. This ensures no one will accidentally commit this unimportant file.

Git supports global ignores just like any good SCM.

$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
$ printf ".DS_Store\nThumbs.db\n" >> ~/.gitignore

For good measure I threw in Windows’ creepy file Thumbs.db.

Sadly this won’t stop other developers from accidentally committing those files, so you still need to add those ignores to your .gitignore in every project. I’ve setup my git init alias to do this for me.