Ignore Files Specific To Your Workflow

If you want to watch instead of read, I explore this in Four Ways to Ignore Files with Git.

The most common way to tell git to ignore files is to add them to a project's .gitignore file. This file is kept under version control, so it is shared with anyone who clones the project.

What about ignoring files that shouldn't necessarily be recorded in the project's .gitignore?

For instance, let's say I create a notes.md file to write some project notes to myself or keep track of a few todo items. This file is just for me. I don't want it committed. Because this notes.md is an idiosyncrasy of my workflow, I don't want to exclude it in the tracked .gitignore file.

Instead, this file is a perfect candidate for the git repository's .git/info/exclude file. Git treats entries in this file the same as it does the .gitignore file. This file only exists on my machine and is not under version control.

# .git/info/exclude
notes.md

Once I've added that line, notes.md will no longer show up as an untracked file when I run git status.

See man gitignore for more details.

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