gitignore all files of extension in directory

Question

Is there a way to ignore all files of a type in a directory?

** is apparently meaningless to git, so this doesn't work:

/public/static/**/*.js

The idea is to match arbitrary nested folders.

Answer 1

UPDATE: Take a look at @Joey's answer: Git now supports the ** syntax in patterns. Both approaches should work fine.

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The gitignore(5) man page states:

Patterns read from a .gitignore file in the same directory as the path, or in any parent directory, with patterns in the higher level files (up to the toplevel of the work tree) being overridden by those in lower level files down to the directory containing the file.

What this means is that the patterns in a .gitignore file in any given directory of your repo will affect that directory and all subdirectories.

The pattern you provided

/public/static/**/*.js

isn't quite right, firstly because (as you correctly noted) the ** syntax is not used by Git. Also, the leading / anchors that pattern to the start of the pathname. (So, /public/static/*.js will match /public/static/foo.js but not /public/static/foo/bar.js.) Removing the leading / won't work either, matching paths like public/static/foo.js and foo/public/static/bar.js. EDIT: Just removing the leading slash won't work either — because the pattern still contains a slash, it is treated by Git as a plain, non-recursive shell glob (thanks @Joey Hoer for pointing this out).

As @ptyx suggested, what you need to do is create the file <repo>/public/static/.gitignore and include just this pattern:

*.js

There is no leading /, so it will match at any part of the path, and that pattern will only ever be applied to files in the /public/static directory and its subdirectories.

Answer 2

It would appear that the ** syntax is supported by git as of version 1.8.2.1 according to the documentation.

Two consecutive asterisks ("**") in patterns matched against full pathname may have special meaning:

• A leading "**" followed by a slash means match in all directories. For example, "**/foo" matches file or directory "foo" anywhere, the same as pattern "foo". "**/foo/bar" matches file or directory "bar" anywhere that is directly under directory "foo".

• A trailing "/**" matches everything inside. For example, "abc/**" matches all files inside directory "abc", relative to the location of the .gitignore file, with infinite depth.

• A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks then a slash matches zero or more directories. For example, "a/**/b" matches "a/b", "a/x/b", "a/x/y/b" and so on.

• Other consecutive asterisks are considered invalid.

Answer 3

To ignore untracked files just go to .git/info/exclude. Exclude is a file with a list of ignored extensions or files.

Answer 4

Never tried it, but git help ignore suggests that if you put a .gitignore with *.js in /public/static, it will do what you want.

Note: make sure to also check out Joeys' answer below: if you want to ignore files in a specific subdirectory, then a local .gitignore is the right solution (locality is good). However if you need the same pattern to apply to your whole repo, then the ** solution is better.

Answer 5

I believe the simplest solution would be to use find. I do not like to have multiple .gitignore hanging around in sub-directories and I prefer to manage a unique, top-level .gitignore. To do so you could simply append the found files to your .gitignore. Supposing that /public/static/ is your project/git home I would use something like:

find . -type f -name *.js | cut -c 3- >> .gitignore

I found that cutting out the ./ at the beginning is often necessary for git to understand which files to avoid. Therefore the cut -c 3-.