I don’t wanna commit .DS_Store anymore

As a (relatively recent) macOS user, I’ve worked on a few new repositories in Git, and every single time I am annoyed when I accidentally commit .DS_Store to a repo.

This happens in different ways often enough to make me want to automate this away. And this isn’t unique to just macOS’s stupid files, by the way, it’s a problem with a lot of projects in general:

• No, Git, I (almost) always don’t want to commit my build/ directory from my Rust crate
• No, Git, I don’t want to commit my .env file or my temporary JavaScript build files
• No, Git, I absolutely did not want to commit hugo.exe or .hugo_build.lock (has happened before with other blogs like this one)

Well, in those cases, there’s a feature in Git to avoid that: .gitignore

This file is cool

For every line in .gitignore, if any file or folder matches the naming (or path), Git will just ignore them and pretend like they don’t exist. So, you can do stuff like:

.DS_Store
.hugo_build.locl
public/*           # Do not commit the "public" directory contents...
!public/image.ong  # ...but you can commit this one file only

Super simple, and super cool. However, there’s enough boilerplate in Git ignore files for common projects that you’ll find that even GitHub lets you initialize a project with one:

Surely, there is a quick way to do that locally as well, right?

Of course there is. 😉

Meet git-ignore

Fun fact: Any executable named git-* can be called using git *, because git automatically assumes such executables as extensions to the base functionality. Coolio.

So, obviously, if you name an executable git-ignore, you can create a new command. You can probably guess what this one does, I imagine.

If you can’t, you can read the README here, but in essence, you get a command that lets you ping an online .gitignore generator service and use it to generate a quick .gitignore template the exact way GitHub does it, but from your command-line! No need to make GitHub initialize the repo first. Plus, it’s written in Rust, too!

Just call it in a new repo:

>>> git ignore
Loading ignore templates from GitHub...
Type to search for ignore templates
 - ENTER to select a template or accept selection
 - ESC to cancel at any time
Selected template: Emacs, VisualStudioCode
Search templates: macos
 > macOS
   ReactNative.macOS.stack

It’s really that easy. There are alternatives, too, one of them being gibo, which I used for a while.

Anyway, hopefully you’ll never accidentally end up committing weird files anymore. And hey, if you do, there are ways to nuke them from orbit I’m sure you’ll love..