Notes on Gitignore

in User on Git

When adding code into .git, which is used to push code scripts into github (website), we would set .gitignore. In it, filenames which are set as ignored file for .git would be listed

Example

The following is part of .gitignore file from official yolov7 repo

.gitignore
# Repo-specific GitIgnore ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*.jpg  # ignore any file ending with jpg

*.MOV

!setup.cfg  # not ignore setup.cfg

!cfg/yolov3*.cfg

storage.googleapis.com

runs/*  # ignore run folder

data/*  # ignore data folder
a or b
data/images/*

!data/*.yaml  # not ignore yaml file for subfiles in data folder

!data/hypsconte

!data/images/zidane.jpg

# MATLAB GitIgnore -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*.m~  # ignore any file ending with m~

*.mat

!targets*.mat

# Sensitive or high-churn files:

.idea/**/dataSources/  # ignore dataSources folder under any level of .idea folder

.idea/**/dataSources.ids # ignore dataSources.ids under any level of .idea folder

Regex Use

You may be confused about what exact file path it pointed to, or how to use * or **. Take easy, you gonna figure out all when reading the following.

Asterisk *

It can be used to represent any character, either [a-zA-Z0-9] or special character. It can represent 0 or a number of characters

In office git document, it mentioned * cannot be used to represent slash. It is wrong! Actually * can be used to represent either / or \

Test

  1. Create a directory with subdirectory and keep the current path under aws folder

     - aws
 - utils
     - 1.py
     - 2.py
     - data
         - label1.txt
 - download.py
 - upload.py
 - .gitignore
  2. Edit .gitignore by nano .gitgnore in terminal

  3. Create git on .gitignore level

     git init
 git add .
  4. Check the file added into .git, by git ls-files

    The result would be nothing, which means all the files are ignored by .git But here are some files utils/1.py, which involved / but still be represented by * and ignored by .git

Play

  1. Modify .gitignore by adding aws/utils/* to a new line

  2. Re-do git

     git rm --cached . # remove the previous cached git
 git add .
 git ls -files
  3. You can see, the files from utils folder would be filter out aws/utils can be replaced as aws/utils/ , or aws/utils/*

Double Asterisk **

Two asterisks ** specify any number of subdirectories

Examples

/**: matches everything inside root (.gitignore directory) = /*

a/**/b = a/*/b: ` “a/b”, “a/x/b”, “a/x/y/b” `

Question Mark ?

?: any one character

Others

*.[ab]: filter out any file end with a or b

*.(png|jpg|gif): filter out any file end with png, jpg, git

Special Use

Exclamation Mark !

! is used to keep files. In other words, the file start with ! in .gitignore would be kept by git

For example, !data would keep the data folder

Let’s look at the last example, if we want to ignore the whole aws folder but keep the aws one. There are 2 methods

Method1

aws/*.*  # ignore files in aws folder
aws/data/*   # ignore data subfolder in aws folder`

Method2

aws/*
!aws/utils/  # here we need to add utils (folder name) first, becase last line it ignored every thing
!aws/utils/*`

Subfolder

On git, we cannot keep folder structure but ignore all the files inside. There is a solution to achieve this

Solution

Creating a .gitignore within this directory

# content of this .gitignore 
* # ignore everything within this folder 
!.gitignore # keep gitignore

Explanation

.gitignore is based on current directory. It means, * represent the directory where.gitignore located

So when add .gitignore on this directory, it would works on this directory only

Self-Train

  • Choose one .gitignore repo, and try to understand it

  • Write .gitignore by yourself, to see whether it can keep the files which you expects to have into git

Refer

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25554504/what-does-mean-in-gitignore
  2. https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore
  3. https://github.com/WongKinYiu/yolov7/blob/main/.gitignore