Ignore .gitignore in Git

Caius Durling – 2009-09-21 06:00:00

Recently I ran into an issue where I was working on a project which had files I wanted git to ignore, but I didn't want to commit a .gitignore file into the project. In case you don't know, any files matching a pattern in .gitignore in a git repository are ignored by git. (Unless the file(s) have already been committed, then they need removing from git before they are ignored.)

Initially I figured I could just throw the patterns I needed excluded into my global ~/.gitignore, but quickly realised that I needed files matching these patterns to show up in other git repos, so going the global route really wasn't an option. After some thought I wondered if you could make git ignore .gitignore, whilst still getting it to ignore files matching the other patterns in the .gitignore.

Lets create a new empty repo to test this crazy idea in:

$ mkdir foo
$ cd foo
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Volumes/Brutus/Users/caius/foo/.git/

And create a couple of files for us to play with:

$ touch bar
$ touch baz

Ignore one of the files so we can check other matches are still ignored later on:

$ echo "baz" >> .gitignore
$ git ststatus
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       .gitignore
#       bar
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Ok so far, but we can still see .gitignore in git, so now for the crazy shindig, ignore the ignore file:

$ echo ".gitignore" >> .gitignore

Lets see if it worked, or if we can still see our .gitignore:

$ git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       bar
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

And lets just double-check that .gitignore and baz still exist on the filesystem:

$ ls -a
.               ..              .git            .gitignore      bar             baz

Fantastic! Turns out adding ".gitignore" to .gitignore works perfectly. The file is still parsed by git to ignore everything else too, so it does exactly what I needed in this instance.

3 Comments on Ignore .gitignore in Git

  1. This is completely unnecessary. There are four, not two, ignore files checked for files to, uh, ignore:

    $WORKING_DIRECTORY/.gitignore
$WORKING_DIRECTORY/.git/info/exclude ($REPO/info/exclude)
$(git config core.excludesfile)
$(git config --global core.excludesfile)

    So there are two more semantically appropriate ways: put it in your clone’s local .git/info/exclude file, or set the local core.excludesfile configuration setting to a repo–specific excludes file other than .gitignore.

    elliottcable - 2009-09-21 06:35:42

  2. What happens when you make changes to gitignore after you've ignored it?

    Thomas - 2009-09-21 06:36:26

  3. @elliot:

    You're right, I had forgotten that I could set the core.excludesfile within the repo, rather than globally. What I prefer about ignoring .gitignore is its the first place I'll go to exclude or include a file.

    I guess it's common that the .gitignore contains stuff that everyone who uses that repo should be ignoring, and hence it should be added to the repo. So I can see the point of using .git/info/excludes instead for my local, private ignores.

    @Thomas:

    It ignores whatever you tell it to in the file. If you remove the .gitignore line from it, then git shows it as an untracked file you can add and commit.

    Caius - 2009-09-21 06:45:38
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