Source

These are my notes from reading very nice blog post Git Ignore vs Git Exclude.

Note methodology

I’ve used Jeffrey Kaplan’s methodology for notes.

Notes

• git exclude isn’t widely recognized as git ignore
• Articles covers when and how to use git exclude
• This article is about git exclude one of the two similar functions: ignore and exclude
• To simplify this article, author is going to skip the git prefix and use ignore and exclude
• Article is about git exclude and how it is related to git ignore
• The goal of these two functions is similar, they even share the same help page
• Commands have the same interface and similar function but they are not the same
• Two differences, file location and list of tracking files
• As these two functions are very similar and track information about ignored file, for git they provide different approach of keeping it persistent
• git exclude helps keeping the ignored files for given location, it’s not ment to be shared, git ignore is a way to persist ignored files for every git repository instance.
• We can tell git to don’t track some files using two functions: ignore and exclude, usage depentes on the result, public or private exclusion
• We can use global ignore files to exclude files in all repositories
• We have, in total, three ways to exclude files: repository’s ignore, repository’s exclude and global ignore
• When I only want to hide file for myself - exclude, for everyone - ignore, ignored in many repositories on one machine - global ignore