Version Control with Git > 6. Ignoring Things > b. Exercises

b. Exercises

Ignoring Nested Files

Given a directory structure that looks like:

results/data
results/plots

How would you ignore only results/plots and not results/data?

Solution

If you only want to ignore the contents of results/plots, you can change your .gitignore to ignore only the /plots/ subfolder by adding the following line to your .gitignore:

results/plots/

This line will ensure only the contents of results/plots is ignored, and not the contents of results/data.

As with most programming issues, there are a few alternative ways that one may ensure this ignore rule is followed. The “Ignoring Nested Files: Variation” exercise has a slightly different directory structure that presents an alternative solution. Further, the discussion page has more detail on ignore rules.

Including Specific Files

How would you ignore all .dat files in your root directory except for final.dat? Hint: Find out what ! (the exclamation point operator) does

Solution

You would add the following two lines to your .gitignore:

*.dat           # ignore all data files
!final.dat      # except final.data

The exclamation point operator will include a previously excluded entry.

Note also that because you’ve previously committed .dat files in this lesson they will not be ignored with this new rule. Only future additions of .dat files added to the root directory will be ignored.

Ignoring Nested Files: Variation

Given a directory structure that looks similar to the earlier Nested Files exercise, but with a slightly different directory structure:

results/data
results/images
results/plots
results/analysis

How would you ignore all of the contents in the results folder, but not results/data?

Hint: think a bit about how you created an exception with the ! operator before.

Solution

If you want to ignore the contents of results/ but not those of results/data/, you can change your .gitignore to ignore the contents of results folder, but create an exception for the contents of the results/data subfolder. Your .gitignore would look like this:

results/*               # ignore everything in results folder
!results/data/          # do not ignore results/data/ contents

Ignoring all data Files in a Directory

Assuming you have an empty .gitignore file, and given a directory structure that looks like:

results/data/position/gps/a.dat
results/data/position/gps/b.dat
results/data/position/gps/c.dat
results/data/position/gps/info.txt
results/plots

What’s the shortest .gitignore rule you could write to ignore all .dat files in result/data/position/gps? Do not ignore the info.txt.

Solution

Ignoring all data Files in the repository

Let us assume you have many .dat files in different subdirectories of your repository. For example, you might have:

results/a.dat
data/experiment_1/b.dat
data/experiment_2/c.dat
data/experiment_2/variation_1/d.dat

How do you ignore all the .dat files, without explicitly listing the names of the corresponding folders?

Solution

In the .gitignore file, write:

**/*.dat

This will ignore all the .dat files, regardless of their position in the directory tree. You can still include some specific exception with the exclamation point operator.

The Order of Rules

Given a .gitignore file with the following contents:

*.dat
!*.dat

What will be the result?

Solution

Log Files

You wrote a script that creates many intermediate log-files of the form log_01, log_02, log_03, etc. You want to keep them but you do not want to track them through git.

Write one .gitignore entry that excludes files of the form log_01, log_02, etc.
Test your “ignore pattern” by creating some dummy files of the form log_01, etc.
You find that the file log_01 is very important after all, add it to the tracked files without changing the .gitignore again.
Discuss with your neighbor what other types of files could reside in your directory that you do not want to track and thus would exclude via .gitignore.

Solution

note

`.gitconfig`

The command git config is used to set Git configuration values on a global or local project level which correspond to .gitconfig text files. Executing git config like we did in setup will modify a configuration text file. Here is an example global .gitconfig file which we created from git config --global:

[user]
	email = Vlad Dracula
	name = vlad@tran.sylvan.ia
[pull]
	rebase = true
[credential]
	helper = manager-core
	helper = /usr/bin/git-credential-manager-core
	credentialStore = gpg
[github]
	user = vladDracula

But like .gitignore they can be added at a project level for specific behavours such as in the example above where we are telling git to use the rebase merge strategy instead of fast forward merge.