gitignore in Git

What is gitignore?

Git allows us to specify files and directories that should be ignored by Git when we commit changes to a repository. gitignore is a feature of the version control system.

This is useful when you have files or directories in your project that you don't want to be tracked by Git, such as log files, temporary files, build artifacts, or personal configuration files that are unique to your development environment.

By creating a .gitignore file in the root directory of your Git repository, you can specify patterns fo file and directory names that should be ignored. Git will then not track changes to any files or directories that match the patterns specified in the .gitignore file.

Importance of gitignore

Here are the following reasons to use .gitignore in Git

1. Avoiding accidental commits:

   when you have files in your project that should not be tracked by Git(such as log files or build artifacts), it's easy to accidentally commit them to the repository. This can bloat the repository and make it difficult to track changes. .gitignore gives us a surety that these files are not accidentally committed.

2. Keeping your repository clean:

   You can keep your repository clean and focused on the code by ignoring files that are not essential to the project. It makes it easy to collaborate with others and can help reduce the size of the repository.

3. Reducing merge conflicts:

   If different developers have different files in their local development environment that are not relevant to the project, those files can cause merge conflicts when the changes are merged into the main repository. You can avoid these conflicts by ignoring that files.

4. Customization for different environments:

   Different developers may have different files in their local development environment that are not relevant to the project. Each developer can customize the files by ignoring them with .gitignore.

How to use .gitigonre?

This is useful when you have files or directories in your project that you don't want to be tracked by Git, such as log files, temporary files, build artifacts, or personal configuration files that are unique to your development environment.

.gitignore files can be customized for specific and programming languages, and there are many pre-built .gitignore files available for popular languages and frameworks that you can use as a starting point.

Here we can see an example of .gitignore file.

You can see it in VS Code where log files and exe files are ignored.