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.gitignore File and its relevance to your Git Repository.

Introduction.

Git is a version control tool widely used as a version control system for code. When working on your project locally, and making commits to a remote git repository, there are files or folders that you might not want to commit. Git provides a way to ignore the files and folders that you don't want to commit through a .gitingore file.

This raises the question: What is a .gitignore file? A .gitignore file is a plain text file in your repository's root directory that informs git of files or folders to ignore when making a commit. When git comes in contact with a file or folder listed in the .gitignore file, git will exclude the listed file or folder in future commits. Git will also not track version changes made to the listed file or folder.

Reasons To Ignore Files and Folders in Git.

1. Preventing Unwanted Files from Being Tracked. A .gitignore file allows you to prevent certain files from getting tracked or versioned by Git. This could include editor configuration files such as .vscode folder, and log files.

2. Keeping the Repository Clean. Excluding generated files, content, and assets is considered a best practice in a Git repository. This helps to keep the repository clean. An example of a folder that can be excluded for this purpose is a dist folder as it contains a production-ready compiled version of your code.

3. Avoid Merge Conflicts. In cases where the git repository has multiple contributors, ignoring generated or code specific can help avoid merge conflicts.

4. Security. The file helps protect sensitive and personal information that should be kept private by ignoring files with API keys and secrets, passwords, or sensitive information.

5. Improved Version Control Performance. There is improved performance of git operations like pushing, pulling, and cloning because git isn't handling files such as binary files by minimizing data transfer between the remote repository and local repositories.

What files and folders to ignore:

1. Files containing sensitive information such as API keys secrets, and personal data.

2. Configuration files or folders generated by IDEs and text editors like .vscode folder.

3. Compiled code and binaries such as .class files in Java.

4. Operating System files such as.DS_Store on macOS.

5. Runtime files and logs.

6. Folders containing packages installed in the project like the node_modules folder in Node Js projects. Package managers usually generate these folders.

How to use a .gitignore file.

A .gitignore file follows a syntax where patterns can include comments (#), wildcards(*), forward slash(/), and negation(!). You can then declare the specific files or directories you want to ignore using Gitignore patterns.

Lines beginning with (#) are comments.

Forward Slash(/) is used to ignore folders together with the name. /dist will ignore the dist folder and its contents.

Wildcards are used to ignore files/folders that match the pattern, depending on where they are placed. For example, to ignore files that end with a “.log” file extension, place the wildcard at the beginning of the file extension name such as *.log.

Negation (!) excludes files from being ignored.

Below is an example of a .gitignore file demonstrating the above syntax.

#ignore folders/directories node_modules/ dist/ #ignore files by writing the file name .env .env.local # use an asterisk to ignore any files that match 0 or more characters .log .lock # ! negates files that would be ignored. # below, files with .log pattern will be ignored except npm-debug.log *.log !npm-debug.log # Files in an ignored folder can't be negated as the whole folder is ignored logs/ !logs/npm-debug.log

Conclusion.

Using a .gitignore file is essential to any Git repository whether you are working on a project alone or with collaborators as it helps reduce the instances merge conflicts exist and also keeps sensitive information such as API keys and secrets private.

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