The .gitignore file is a file where you can list files that should be ignored
by git. This will prevent them from showing up in diffs, git status, etc.
Most entries in the .gitignore file will plainly correspond to a single file.
# ignore env var files
.env
.env.local
Sometimes a project has a bunch of similarly named files. Autogenerated files
are a prime example. For instance, a web app project may contain several
sitemap files with incrementing suffix values (i.e. sitemap-1.xml,
sitemap-2.xml, sitemap-3.xml, ...).
I'd like to avoid having to type those all out in my .gitignore file. And I
don't want to have to add new entries whenever another increment of the file is
generated.
I can handle all the current ones and future ones in a single line using some
range pattern matching supported by the .gitignore file format.
# ignore sitemap files
public/sitemap-[1-99].xml
This will ignore any sitemap files suffixed with 1 to 99. I don't really expect there to ever be more than handful of those files, so 99 should definitely do the trick.