How to Setup a Global gitignore File

A Note on the Series:

Fast Fridays 🏎 is a series where you will find fast, short, and sweet tips/hacks that you may or may not be aware of. I will try to provide these (fairly) regularly on Fridays.

In this Fast Friday tip, I'll explain how to create a global gitignore file, showing you just how quick and easy it is to set up.

Step 1: Create the gitignore file and add content

This step is pretty obvious, but the first thing to do is create a file to store the global gitignore settings. You can name this file whatever you want, but a common practice is to name it .gitignore_global.

vim ~/.gitignore_global

Once the .gitignore_global file is created, you can add any files you want to be globally ignored. For example, I've been testing some AI tools that generate markdown files after analyzing your codebase, so I have a GEMINI.md file in my global ignore file.

Step 2: Configure Git to use the global gitignore

Now that we have a global gitignore file created, we need to tell Git where to find it. This can be set up in two different ways:

1. Using the git config command.

2. Directly editing the git config files in your $HOME/.gitconfig file.

I would recommend going with option #1. I find this to be the fastest way to set things up so that will be the method I discuss. However, feel free to do whatever works best for you.

Here is the command to configure Git to leverage the new ignore file:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Verify the configuration

This is an optional step, but if you wanted to verify that the Git is properly referencing the new global ignore file that you just configured, you can run the following command:

git config --global core.excludesfile

If you see the file name outputted, then you know everything is set up correctly. On the other hand, if the output is empty, it means the setup wasn't successful. Of course another way to verify is to check that the files you added to your global ignore are no longer present, but this command is a convenient way to double-check.

El Fin 👋🏽

Voilà! That's all you need to do. Just two simple steps to set up your global gitignore. Now, files will be properly ignored in any project you work on.

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As always, thank you for reading, and happy coding!