Git Ignore

You won’t always want to add every file in a directory to your git repository. Extra files like local backups, local caches of files, variables that apply to your terminal set up don’t need to be added to your git repository: they’re only needed on your machine.

You can add only the files you want using git add for each file. Sometimes you want to add lots of files in one go, but tell git to ignore some files or a particular folder. If you want to tell git to ignore a file forever (to never add it), you can list it in a special .gitignore file.

If you wanted to ignore any files in a directory called tmp, your gitignore would look like this

tmp

If you wanted to ignore any files that end with ~, your gitignore would look like this

*~