The .gitignore file is a text file that tells Git which files or folders to ignore in a project.
A local .gitignore file is usually placed in the root directory of a project. You can also create a global .gitignore file and any entries in that file will be ignored in all of your Git repositories.
The entries in this file can also follow a matching pattern.
*is used as a wildcard match/is used to ignore pathnames relative to the .gitignore file#is used to add comments to a .gitignore file
This is an example of what the .gitignore file could look like:
# Ignore Mac system files
.DS_store
# Ignore node_modules folder
node_modules
# Ignore all text files
*.txt
# Ignore files related to API keys
.env
# Ignore SASS config files
.sass-cache
# ignores any file named "secret.txt"
secret.txt
# ignores any directory named "secrets"
secrets/
# ignores a file named "hidden.txt" located at the root of your working directory
/hidden.txt
# ignores a directory called "node_modules" located at the root of your working directory
/node_modules/
# ignores any file with a .png extension
*.png
# ignores any file or directory that begins in "cache", such as cache-file-01, cached_assets/, etc.
cache*
# ignores any file or directory that ends in "data", such as project_data/, big_file_of_data
*dataTo add or change your global .gitignore file, run the following command:
git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_globalThis will create the file ~/.gitignore_global. Now you can edit that file the same way as a local .gitignore file. All of your Git repositories will ignore the files and folders listed in the global .gitignore file.