Git – Global Git ignore

gitgitignoreglobal

I want to set up Git to globally ignore certain files.

I have added a .gitignore file to my home directory (/Users/me/) and I have added the following line to it:

*.tmproj

But it is not ignoring this type of files, any idea what I am doing wrong?

Best Answer

You need to set up your global core.excludesfile configuration file to point to this global ignore file e.g:

*nix or Windows git bash:

git config --global core.excludesFile '~/.gitignore'

Windows cmd:

git config --global core.excludesFile "%USERPROFILE%\.gitignore"

Windows PowerShell:

git config --global core.excludesFile "$Env:USERPROFILE\.gitignore"

For Windows it is set to the location C:\Users\{myusername}\.gitignore. You can verify that the config value is correct by doing:

git config --global core.excludesFile

The result should be the expanded path to your user profile's .gitignore. Ensure that the value does not contain the unexpanded %USERPROFILE% string.

Important: The above commands will only set the location of the ignore file that git will use. The file has to still be manually created in that location and populated with the ignore list. (from muruge's comment)

You can read about the command at https://help.github.com/articles/ignoring-files/#create-a-global-gitignore

Related Solutions

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

In the simplest terms, git pull does a git fetch followed by a git merge.

You can do a git fetch at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/. This operation never changes any of your own local branches under refs/heads, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. I have even heard of people running git fetch periodically in a cron job in the background (although I wouldn't recommend doing this).

A git pull is what you would do to bring a local branch up-to-date with its remote version, while also updating your other remote-tracking branches.

From the Git documentation for git pull:

In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

You can undo git add before commit with

git reset <file>

which will remove it from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.

You can use

git reset

without any file name to unstage all due changes. This can come in handy when there are too many files to be listed one by one in a reasonable amount of time.

In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:

"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

Documentation: git reset

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

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