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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | PATTERN FORMAT | CONFIGURATION | NOTES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GITIGNORE(5) Git Manual GITIGNORE(5)
gitignore - Specifies intentionally untracked files to ignore
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore, $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, .gitignore
A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git
should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see
the NOTES below for details.
Each line in a gitignore file specifies a pattern. When deciding
whether to ignore a path, Git normally checks gitignore patterns
from multiple sources, with the following order of precedence,
from highest to lowest (within one level of precedence, the last
matching pattern decides the outcome):
• Patterns read from the command line for those commands that
support them.
• Patterns read from a .gitignore file in the same directory as
the path, or in any parent directory (up to the top-level of
the working tree), with patterns in the higher level files
being overridden by those in lower level files down to the
directory containing the file. These patterns match relative
to the location of the .gitignore file. A project normally
includes such .gitignore files in its repository, containing
patterns for files generated as part of the project build.
• Patterns read from $GIT_DIR/info/exclude.
• Patterns read from the file specified by the configuration
variable core.excludesFile.
Which file to place a pattern in depends on how the pattern is
meant to be used.
• Patterns which should be version-controlled and distributed to
other repositories via clone (i.e., files that all developers
will want to ignore) should go into a .gitignore file.
• Patterns which are specific to a particular repository but
which do not need to be shared with other related repositories
(e.g., auxiliary files that live inside the repository but are
specific to one user’s workflow) should go into the
$GIT_DIR/info/exclude file.
• Patterns which a user wants Git to ignore in all situations
(e.g., backup or temporary files generated by the user’s
editor of choice) generally go into a file specified by
core.excludesFile in the user’s ~/.gitconfig. Its default
value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is
either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used
instead.
The underlying Git plumbing tools, such as git ls-files and git
read-tree, read gitignore patterns specified by command-line
options, or from files specified by command-line options.
Higher-level Git tools, such as git status and git add, use
patterns from the sources specified above.
• A blank line matches no files, so it can serve as a separator
for readability.
• A line starting with # serves as a comment. Put a backslash
("\") in front of the first hash for patterns that begin with
a hash.
• Trailing spaces are ignored unless they are quoted with
backslash ("\").
• An optional prefix "!" which negates the pattern; any matching
file excluded by a previous pattern will become included
again. It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent
directory of that file is excluded. Git doesn’t list excluded
directories for performance reasons, so any patterns on
contained files have no effect, no matter where they are
defined. Put a backslash ("\") in front of the first "!" for
patterns that begin with a literal "!", for example,
"\!important!.txt".
• The slash "/" is used as the directory separator. Separators
may occur at the beginning, middle or end of the .gitignore
search pattern.
• If there is a separator at the beginning or middle (or both)
of the pattern, then the pattern is relative to the directory
level of the particular .gitignore file itself. Otherwise the
pattern may also match at any level below the .gitignore
level.
• If there is a separator at the end of the pattern then the
pattern will only match directories, otherwise the pattern can
match both files and directories.
• For example, a pattern doc/frotz/ matches doc/frotz directory,
but not a/doc/frotz directory; however frotz/ matches frotz
and a/frotz that is a directory (all paths are relative from
the .gitignore file).
• An asterisk "*" matches anything except a slash. The character
"?" matches any one character except "/". The range notation,
e.g. [a-zA-Z], can be used to match one of the characters in a
range. See fnmatch(3) and the FNM_PATHNAME flag for a more
detailed description.
Two consecutive asterisks ("**") in patterns matched against full
pathname may have special meaning:
• A leading "**" followed by a slash means match in all
directories. For example, "**/foo" matches file or directory
"foo" anywhere, the same as pattern "foo". "**/foo/bar"
matches file or directory "bar" anywhere that is directly
under directory "foo".
• A trailing "/**" matches everything inside. For example,
"abc/**" matches all files inside directory "abc", relative to
the location of the .gitignore file, with infinite depth.
• A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks then a slash
matches zero or more directories. For example, "a/**/b"
matches "a/b", "a/x/b", "a/x/y/b" and so on.
• Other consecutive asterisks are considered regular asterisks
and will match according to the previous rules.
The optional configuration variable core.excludesFile indicates a
path to a file containing patterns of file names to exclude,
similar to $GIT_DIR/info/exclude. Patterns in the exclude file are
used in addition to those in $GIT_DIR/info/exclude.
The purpose of gitignore files is to ensure that certain files not
tracked by Git remain untracked.
To stop tracking a file that is currently tracked, use git rm
--cached to remove the file from the index. The filename can then
be added to the .gitignore file to stop the file from being
reintroduced in later commits.
Git does not follow symbolic links when accessing a .gitignore
file in the working tree. This keeps behavior consistent when the
file is accessed from the index or a tree versus from the
filesystem.
• The pattern hello.* matches any file or directory whose name
begins with hello.. If one wants to restrict this only to the
directory and not in its subdirectories, one can prepend the
pattern with a slash, i.e. /hello.*; the pattern now matches
hello.txt, hello.c but not a/hello.java.
• The pattern foo/ will match a directory foo and paths
underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a symbolic
link foo (this is consistent with the way how pathspec works
in general in Git)
• The pattern doc/frotz and /doc/frotz have the same effect in
any .gitignore file. In other words, a leading slash is not
relevant if there is already a middle slash in the pattern.
• The pattern foo/*, matches foo/test.json (a regular file),
foo/bar (a directory), but it does not match foo/bar/hello.c
(a regular file), as the asterisk in the pattern does not
match bar/hello.c which has a slash in it.
$ git status
[...]
# Untracked files:
[...]
# Documentation/foo.html
# Documentation/gitignore.html
# file.o
# lib.a
# src/internal.o
[...]
$ cat .git/info/exclude
# ignore objects and archives, anywhere in the tree.
*.[oa]
$ cat Documentation/.gitignore
# ignore generated html files,
*.html
# except foo.html which is maintained by hand
!foo.html
$ git status
[...]
# Untracked files:
[...]
# Documentation/foo.html
[...]
Another example:
$ cat .gitignore
vmlinux*
$ ls arch/foo/kernel/vm*
arch/foo/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
$ echo '!/vmlinux*' >arch/foo/kernel/.gitignore
The second .gitignore prevents Git from ignoring
arch/foo/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S.
Example to exclude everything except a specific directory foo/bar
(note the /* - without the slash, the wildcard would also exclude
everything within foo/bar):
$ cat .gitignore
# exclude everything except directory foo/bar
/*
!/foo
/foo/*
!/foo/bar
git-rm(1), gitrepository-layout(5), git-check-ignore(1)
Part of the git(1) suite
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
system) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-07.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.51.0.rc1 2025-08-07 GITIGNORE(5)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-check-ignore(1), git-clean(1), git-commit(1), git-commit-tree(1), git-config(1), git-init(1), git-log(1), git-ls-files(1), git-read-tree(1), git-show(1), git-sparse-checkout(1), git-status(1), gitattributes(5), gitrepository-layout(5), gitfaq(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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