Git - global .gitignore file

Let’s say that you work in the team where everyone uses different code editor/IDE. One person uses PyCharm and he doesn’t want to commit .idea directory which keeps PyCharm files for current project. He adds .idea to project .gitignore file. Next person uses Sublime, so he adds *.sublime-project and *.sublime-workspace to the .gitignore file. Every team member can add own things to .gitignore. After some time it can look like this:

### IDE/Editor configs
.idea
# Eclipse
.project
.pydevproject
.settings/
# Vim
.ropeproject
# Sublime
*.sublime-project
*.sublime-workspace

# local virtualenv
.venv

Is it a good solution? I don’t think so. The .gitignore file should keep things only related to project, our IDE configuration files are not.

Solution?

You can create own global .gitignore. Create ~/.gitignore_global file and add your IDE/code editor/other stuff which should be ignored. Next, inform git that it should take this file into account.

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Now, whatever you put in the ~/.gitignore_global file, it will be used for every git project. You can clean up project .gitignore file ;-)