shiningthrough

Ignoring Ruby On Rails files with Git, on OS X, and using TextMate

I thought I would share which files I ignore with Git, while developing Ruby On Rails applications using TextMate on Mac OS X.

There are 2 ways to ignore files using Git:

• Specify the files to ignore in a .gitignore file that can be created in any Git directory, but is most commonly created just once in your root Git directory. This file gets included in your git repository, it's for ignoring files that anyone cloning your repository would also want to ignore.
• Specify the files to ignore in an exclude file that can be found at .git/info/exclude from your root Git directory. This file is not included in your git repository, its for your use only, and should be used for ignoring files that only exist because of your setup and environment.

my .gitignore file

log/*.log
tmp/**/*
config/*.yml
db/*.sqlite3
mkmf.log

These are all fairly self explanatory, mkmf.log is a file created by Capistrano after a deployment.

My .git/info/exclude file

# git-ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~
.DS_Store
._*
*.tmproj

.DS_Store and ._* files are created by Mac OS X, and *.tmproj files are created by TextMate, my editor of choice, therefore these files are unique to my setup and belong in the .git/info/exclude file.

If anyone else has any suggestions, leave a comment, and i'll adjust the above examples accordingly.