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When working in Git, we sometimes need to ignore files that we don't need or accidentally commit to a remote repository. We can configure Git to ignore those files that we don't want checked into the remote repository.

It will ensure that Git does not track these files and ignores them for future commits from that local machine. Some developers get annoyed by having to repeatedly copy and paste the same ignored files for every project they develop for any client.

For this situation, Git has .gitignorethe ultimate solution of keeping all IDE specific and OS files in a global file. The project's gitignorewill be used to keep project specific files in the future.

Ignore files globally in Git

To use these commands consistently or globally in the future, we created a .gitignorefile that specifies rules for ignoring files in all Git repositories on the local machine.

We develop a file *~/.gitignore_globaland specify some rules related to future pushes to the same repository. For this case, we have to enhance our globalcore.excludesfileconfiguration file to locate this global ignore file.

Here are .gitignorethe steps to create the file.

In the first step, we will C:\Users\{username}create a file on our local machine at a path .gitignoresuch as C:\Users\Johnso that the next time we push our project to a remote repository, we can access the file.

After that, we will adjust the path in three different ways .gitignore. With its help, we will tell Git globally to ignore the file in future pushes.

We will discuss these three methods one by one through the following examples.

.gitignoreAdjusting Paths with Windows Git Bash

First, we will open Windows git bash and write the following command.

git config --global core.excludesFile '~/.gitignore'

Use Windows CMD to adjust .gitignorethe path

In this way, we will open Windows CMD and write this command.

git config --global core.excludesFile "%USERPROFILE%\.gitignore"

.gitignoreAdjusting the path using Windows PowerShell

Open Windows PowerShell and write the following command into it.

git config --global core.excludesFile "$Env:USERPROFILE\.gitignore"

Now we can easily set up .gitignorea global file to make our life easier.

Verify configFile

As we all know, all systems are set up differently, so in order to verify our macOS, Windows, or Windows PowerShell configfile to see if it is correct, we will run the following command:

git config --global core.excludesfile

The output will be the full path to the file.

If we see that %USERPROFILE%, then we have a problem.

If we see $HOME/.gitignore_globalor %USERPROFILE%\.gitignore, something went wrong. On Windows, if we can no longer use %USERPROFILE%the variable, we will run the following command in the command prompt and see the expected answer:

git config - global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Additionally, we will go into that folder and turn on the hidden .gitconfigfiles. We will manually edit excludesfilethe path to get back to our .gitignore_globallocation.

In the following example it would look like this.

[core]excludesfile = C:\Users\adammcelhaney\.gitignore_global