Ever wanted a local .gitignore file? For example to prevent accidentally pushing a bunch of test files to the remote repository?
I recently learned that there is a small file inside every .git folder that does exactly that.
Introducing: .git/info/exclude.
By default the file looks like this:
# git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~
Personally, I like to keep a justfile inside my repositories for project-specific commands that I execute regularly. To prevent accidentally pushing the justfile, I can add it to .git/info/exclude like so:
# git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~
justfile
In fact, every option that is valid for a .gitignore file, is valid for a .git/info/exclude file. They even share a page in the Git documentation