Git gitignore

What .gitignore Controls

Git only ever tracks files you've explicitly added at some point. .gitignore doesn't stop you from tracking a file that's already tracked, it only affects untracked files, telling commands like git status and git add . to skip anything matching its patterns. It's plain text, one pattern per line, and typically lives at your repository root, though additional .gitignore files in subdirectories can add folder-specific rules.

Pattern Syntax and Wildcards

Patterns are matched like shell globs. A single * matches any characters except a slash, so *.log matches error.log at any depth. Two asterisks, **, match across directory boundaries, so logs/**/debug.log matches both logs/debug.log and logs/2026/07/debug.log. A trailing slash restricts a pattern to directories only, and a leading slash anchors it to the location of the .gitignore file itself rather than matching everywhere in the repo.

node_modules/
dist/
.env
*.log
.DS_Store

Negation: Un-Ignoring a File

A pattern prefixed with ! re-includes a file that would otherwise be excluded by an earlier rule. This is commonly used to ignore a whole directory of build artifacts while still tracking one important file inside it, such as a .gitkeep placeholder. Order matters: you generally cannot re-include a file inside a directory that was itself excluded by a directory-level pattern, only files excluded by a file-level wildcard.

config/*
!config/defaults.yml

Debugging Ignore Rules

It's easy to write a pattern that doesn't do what you expect. Two commands make this easy to debug: git status --ignored lists every file currently being ignored, and git check-ignore -v reports exactly which line, in which file, is responsible for ignoring a given path.

$ git status --ignored

$ git check-ignore -v src/config/local.json

Untracking Files Already Committed

Adding a pattern to .gitignore has no effect on files Git is already tracking, a common source of confusion when someone commits a .env file before it was ignored. To fix that, untrack the file explicitly while leaving it on disk, then commit the removal.

$ git rm --cached .env
$ git commit -m "Stop tracking .env, now gitignored"

• node_modules/, vendor/ - installed dependencies, always regenerable
• dist/, build/, out/ - compiled or bundled output
• .env, *.local - machine-specific config and secrets
• *.log, npm-debug.log* - runtime and tool logs
• .DS_Store, Thumbs.db - OS-generated clutter files
• .idea/, .vscode/ - editor settings, team preference, some teams track .vscode/settings.json deliberately