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Ignoring files

In this article

You can configure Git to ignore files you don't want to check in to GitHub.

Configuring ignored files for a single repository

You can create a .gitignore file in your repository's root directory to tell Git which files and directories to ignore when you make a commit. To share the ignore rules with other users who clone the repository, commit the .gitignore file in to your repository.

GitHub maintains an official list of recommended .gitignore files for many popular operating systems, environments, and languages in the github/gitignore public repository. You can also use gitignore.io to create a .gitignore file for your operating system, programming language, or IDE. For more information, see "github/gitignore" and the "gitignore.io" site.

  1. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bash.

  2. Navigate to the location of your Git repository.

  3. Create a .gitignore file for your repository.

    $ touch .gitignore

    If the command succeeds, there will be no output.

For an example .gitignore file, see "Some common .gitignore configurations" in the Octocat repository.

If you want to ignore a file that is already checked in, you must untrack the file before you add a rule to ignore it. From your terminal, untrack the file.

$ git rm --cached FILENAME

Configuring ignored files for all repositories on your computer

You can also create a global .gitignore file to define a list of rules for ignoring files in every Git repository on your computer. For example, you might create the file at ~/.gitignore_global and add some rules to it.

  1. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bash.
  2. Configure Git to use the exclude file ~/.gitignore_global for all Git repositories. 
    $ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Excluding local files without creating a .gitignore file

If you don't want to create a .gitignore file to share with others, you can create rules that are not committed with the repository. You can use this technique for locally-generated files that you don't expect other users to generate, such as files created by your editor.

Use your favorite text editor to open the file called .git/info/exclude within the root of your Git repository. Any rule you add here will not be checked in, and will only ignore files for your local repository.

  1. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bash.
  2. Navigate to the location of your Git repository.
  3. Using your favorite text editor, open the file .git/info/exclude.

Further Reading