Ignoring Things¶
title: Ignoring Things teaching: 5 exercises: 0
Objectives
- Configure Git to ignore specific files.
- Explain why ignoring files can be useful.
What if we have files that we do not want Git to track for us, like backup files created by our editor or intermediate files created during data analysis? Let's create a few dummy files:
and see what Git says:
code
Putting these files under version control would be a waste of disk space. What's worse, having them all listed could distract us from changes that actually matter, so let's tell Git to ignore them.
We do this by creating a file in the root directory of our project called .gitignore
:
These patterns tell Git to ignore any file whose name ends in .csv
and everything in the results
directory.
(If any of these files were already being tracked,
Git would continue to track them.)
Once we have created this file,
the output of git status
is much cleaner:
code
The only thing Git notices now is the newly-created .gitignore
file.
You might think we wouldn't want to track it,
but everyone we're sharing our repository with will probably want to ignore
the same things that we're ignoring.
Let's add and commit .gitignore
:
code
As a bonus, using .gitignore
helps us avoid accidentally adding files to the repository that we don't want to track:
code
If we really want to override our ignore settings,
we can use git add -f
to force Git to add something. For example,
git add -f a.csv
.
We can also always see the status of ignored files if we want:
code
Ignoring Nested Files
Given a directory structure that looks like:
How would you ignore only results/plots
and not results/data
?
Solution
If you only want to ignore the contents of
results/plots
, you can change your .gitignore
to ignore
only the /plots/
subfolder by adding the following line to
your .gitignore:
This line will ensure only the contents of results/plots
is ignored, and
not the contents of results/data
.
As with most programming issues, there are a few alternative ways that one may ensure this ignore rule is followed. The "Ignoring Nested Files: Variation" exercise has a slightly different directory structure that presents an alternative solution. Further, the discussion page has more detail on ignore rules.
Including Specific Files
How would you ignore all .csv
files in your root directory except for
final.csv
?
Hint: Find out what !
(the exclamation point operator) does
Solution
You would add the following two lines to your .gitignore:
The exclamation point operator will include a previously excluded entry.
Note also that because you've previously committed .csv
files in this
lesson they will not be ignored with this new rule. Only future additions
of .csv
files added to the root directory will be ignored.
Ignoring Nested Files: Variation
Given a directory structure that looks similar to the earlier Nested Files exercise, but with a slightly different directory structure:
How would you ignore all of the contents in the results folder, but not results/data
?
Hint: think a bit about how you created an exception with the !
operator
before.
Solution
If you want to ignore the contents of
results/
but not those of results/data/
, you can change your .gitignore
to ignore
the contents of results folder, but create an exception for the contents of the
results/data
subfolder. Your .gitignore would look like this:
File-code
Assuming you have an empty .gitignore file, and given a directory structure that looks like:
code
What's the shortest .gitignore
rule you could write to ignore all .csv
files in result/data/position/gps
? Do not ignore the info.txt
.
Solution
Appending results/data/position/gps/*.csv
will match every file in results/data/position/gps
that ends with .csv
.
The file results/data/position/gps/info.txt
will not be ignored.
Ignoring all data Files in the repository
Let us assume you have many .csv
files in different subdirectories of your repository.
For example, you might have:
code
How do you ignore all the .csv
files, without explicitly listing the names of the corresponding folders?
The Order of Rules
Given a .gitignore
file with the following contents:
What will be the result?
Solution
The !
modifier will negate an entry from a previously defined ignore pattern.
Because the !*.csv
entry negates all of the previous .csv
files in the .gitignore
,
one of them will be ignored, and all .csv
files will be tracked.
Log Files
You wrote a script that creates many intermediate log-files of the form log_01
, log_02
, log_03
, etc.
You want to keep them but you do not want to track them through git
.
-
Write one
.gitignore
entry that excludes files of the formlog_01
,log_02
, etc. -
Test your "ignore pattern" by creating some dummy files of the form
log_01
, etc. -
You find that the file
log_01
is very important after all, add it to the tracked files without changing the.gitignore
again. -
Discuss with your neighbor what other types of files could reside in your directory that you do not want to track and thus would exclude via
.gitignore
.
Solution
- append either
log_*
orlog*
as a new entry in your .gitignore - track
log_01
usinggit add -f log_01
Keypoints
- The
.gitignore
file tells Git what files to ignore.