¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

.gitignore is the canonical way to exclude files from your git repository.

In some situations, however, you may want to exclude files without adding them to .gitignore, because they are only relevant to you, as opposed to your teammates.

Common examples:

• .ackrc: exclude file patterns from search with ack – not everyone in your team may use ack at all
• .envrc: direnv integration to automatically run a couple of commands whenever cd‘ing to within the repository – not everyone in your team may use direnv at all

…and so on.

Is there a way to have a “personal” .gitignore file? Yes, in fact, many ways!

1) Per repository #

Use the .git/info/exclude file instead of .gitignore. Edits in this file are not tracked by version control. The documentation says:

# 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]
# *~
.ackrc
.envrc

For example, I could add .ackrc to it.

2) git update-index #

% git update-index --assume-unchanged .ackrc .envrc

If you make a mistake, it can be reversed with --no-assume-unchanged.

3) Globally #

This approach takes effect in all repositories.

Set core.excludesFile in your ~/.gitconfig:

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

Now populate it as you normally would your repo .gitignore.

References #

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/653454/how-do-you-make-git-ignore-files-without-using-gitignore
• https://gist.github.com/subfuzion/db7f57fff2fb6998a16c