.gitignore Generator

What a .gitignore file does

A .gitignore lists files Git should not track: dependencies that a package manager can restore (node_modules/, vendor/), build output (dist/, target/), caches, logs, editor settings and secrets such as .env. Keeping them out makes repositories smaller, diffs readable and accidental leaks of credentials less likely.

The file only affects untracked files. If something is already committed, adding it to .gitignore does not remove it; run git rm --cached <file> (or git rm -r --cached <dir>) and commit to stop tracking it while keeping the local copy.

.gitignore pattern syntax

Order matters: the last matching pattern wins, which is why negations such as !.vscode/settings.json come after the broad .vscode/* they carve an exception from.

*.log

A pattern without a slash matches at any depth: every .log file in the repository.

/build

A leading slash anchors the pattern to the directory containing the .gitignore, so only the top-level build is ignored.

dist/

A trailing slash matches directories only, not a file named dist.

**/temp

Two asterisks match any number of directories: temp in the root or anywhere below it.

!.env.example

A leading exclamation mark re-includes a file excluded by an earlier pattern. It cannot re-include a file whose parent directory is excluded.

# comment

Lines starting with # are comments; blank lines are separators. Put a backslash before a leading # or ! to match it literally.

How templates are combined

Each template becomes a section headed ### Name ###. With Remove duplicate patterns on, a pattern that already appeared in an earlier section is left out of later ones, and a comment block whose patterns were all removed goes with them, so the file stays short without losing its explanations. Negated patterns are kept in place, because their position relative to the pattern they override is what gives them meaning.

Templates for build tools and frameworks often overlap — Node, Next.js and Vite all ignore node_modules and logs — so de-duplicating a combined file typically removes a fifth or more of its lines.

Project, global and local ignore files

Commit the project .gitignore so everyone shares it, and keep it to files the project itself produces. Files only your machine creates — .DS_Store, Thumbs.db, your editor's folder — can also go in a global ignore file, set with git config --global core.excludesFile ~/.gitignore_global, so you never have to add them to each repository. For ignores that are yours alone in one repository, use .git/info/exclude, which is never committed.

Lock files such as package-lock.json, poetry.lock and Cargo.lock for applications should be committed, not ignored: they make installs reproducible. None of the templates here ignores them. To check which rule ignores a file, run git check-ignore -v path/to/file.

Keep secrets out of Git

The Env & secrets template ignores .env files, private keys and common credential files while keeping .env.example, the file that documents which variables a project needs. Ignoring a secret only prevents future commits: if a key has ever been pushed, rotate it, because it remains in the history. Related tools: chmod calculator for file permissions and robots.txt generator for what crawlers may fetch.