The rules for the patterns you can put in the .gitignore file are as follows:
- Blank lines or lines starting with
#are ignored. - Standard glob patterns work.
- You can end patterns with a forward slash (
/) to specify a directory. - You can negate a pattern by starting it with an exclamation point (
!).
Glob patterns are like simplified regular expressions that shells use. An asterisk (*) matches zero or more characters; [abc] matches any character inside the brackets (in this case a, b, or c); a question mark (?) matches a single character; and brackets enclosing characters separated by a hyphen([0-9]) matches any character between them (in this case 0 through 9). You can also use two asterisks to match nested directories; a/**/zwould match a/z, a/b/z, a/b/c/z, and so on.
Here is another example .gitignore file:
# no .a files *.a # but do track lib.a, even though you‘re ignoring .a files above !lib.a # only ignore the root TODO file, not subdir/TODO /TODO # ignore all files in the build/ directory build/ # ignore doc/notes.txt, but not doc/server/arch.txt doc/*.txt # ignore all .txt files in the doc/ directory doc/**/*.txt
GitHub maintains a fairly comprehensive list of good .gitignore file examples for dozens of projects and languages at https://github.com/github/gitignore if you want a starting point for your project.