.gitignore Everything by Default • Hacker News Board

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#91

Post by godelski » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

kryptiskt wrote: post #81

grim_io wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the colleagues I've worked with only use "git add ." without checking first. Keys, npm directories and huge binaries are fixed by deleting them later on. The horror.

The problem is that those developers are also going to forget to update the ignore-by-default .gitignore to allow files, so there will be missing files. And they won't see any problems, because it works on their machine.

It's at least easy to fix.

Not pushing a file has a much easier fix than pushing an API key. The damage is also very different.

Sure, both have failure modes but the effect of the failure is different and acting like they're the same isn't helpful to finding solutions

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#92

Post by Waterluvian » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #52

It is weird that quite a few developers comes up with advices where they seem to come from a world where they work alone, have not work with enough people, or with enough projects. In this case, a `.gitignore_global` takes care of the usual suspects that he mentioned `.DS_Store files, IDE config, compressed files, etc.`. Even if something goes wrong, it is usually caught during the initial scaffold before critical fi…

> It is weird that quite a few developers comes up with advices where they seem to come from a world where they work alone, have not work with enough people, or with enough projects.

What is weird about it?

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#93

Post by godelski » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #13

rcfox wrote: post #10

This seems like bad advice. I've very rarely committed extra files by accident, but I would 100% forget to unignore files I meant to commit. If you're doing an initial setup step to gitignore everything, why not just do an initial setup step to gitignore the usual files? Make a template that you copy into all of your repos.

>This seems like bad advice. I've very rarely committed extra files by accident, [...] You clearly haven't seen the people who are lazy and so just do `git add . && git commit -m ... && git push -f origin` every time.

  > people who are lazy and so just do `git add . && git commit -m ... && git push -f origin` every time.

People? Even LLMs do that

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#94

Post by globular-toast » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

Git already works like this. It won't commit anything unless you explicitly stage it first.

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#95

Post by bloomers » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

zarlss43 wrote: post #32

vivzkestrel wrote: post #29

- or you could stop scratching your head so hard and actually use the gitignore templates for every programming language officially recommended by github itself - https://github.com/github/gitignore - funny how I did not see a single comment talk about this

These do not include os generated files like his first example, .DS_Store. I do use the templates, but I have a gist that I add to every project of os generated files that may work themselves in.

It's a good practice to ignore OS specific files in user level gitignore but I think that putting it (redundantly for some of us) in repo is a good practice. Some people don't maintain their own user ignores and might accidentally commit to shared repository. It's clearly fault of commiter and reviewer but let's just save ourselves stress and put those records in the .gitignore of the repo.

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#96

Post by der_gopher » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

rcfox wrote: post #10

This seems like bad advice. I've very rarely committed extra files by accident, but I would 100% forget to unignore files I meant to commit. If you're doing an initial setup step to gitignore everything, why not just do an initial setup step to gitignore the usual files? Make a template that you copy into all of your repos.

In my 12 years of software engineering I've seen 10s of times people commit junk.

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#97

Post by der_gopher » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #66

electrovir wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many years I've have a git-ignored ".not-committed" folder in all of my repos for throwing extra anything into. It's been a huge life saver!

You can just add it in a user-level gitignore instead of ignoring it in every repo. See: ~/.config/git/ignore

yes, but user level is not a repo level

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#98

Post by der_gopher » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

aequitas wrote: post #43

caseyw wrote: post #4

I don’t ignore by default, but only stage the items I explicitly want. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been pairing with someone when they just say “git add .”, I’m always confused by that choice. I get it, but I’ve seen more problems arise from adding all than being consistently selective. To each their own.

Lazygit[0] is ideal for quickly selecting files or lines you want to include in your commit. There are probably countless others. And `--patch` is also not that hard. [0] https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

yes, lazygit is huge, I mentioned it in the article too

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#99

Post by der_gopher » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

yipinwong wrote: post #59

Very security engineer minded approach. I block every port for VPS, then open one by one. Same approach here with files. The only downside I see here is, knowing which one to allow. For ports, it's easy, but files can have many different extensions. Apps/CLIs, etc create files with extensions you never encountered before, which can cause issues. Other than that, I like the apporach

I like the analogy with ports, I also do the same - ufw deny all :)

Re: .gitignore Everything by Default

#100

Post by edukite » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

In 2016 I joined C project initially created in 1999. This project had ~7k lines in gitignore and I learned this only because one of my commit created 2h of email exchange why my code does not compile. Turns out filename was forbidden by one rule.

This one file was more sophisticated than any other file in the project.

It contained "good practices", editors/IDE files of applications dead for more than 10y, personal. /tmp directories in various names, files versioning using suffixes and comments for sections v of rules starting about in half of the file.

This project learned my to keep your own shit in local global gitignore not in project.