When would you use .git/info/exclude instead of .gitignore to exclude files?

Question

I am a bit confused about the pros and cons of using .git/info/exclude and .gitignore to exclude files.

Both of them are at the level of the repository/project, so how do they differ and when should we use .git/info/exclude ?

Answer 1

The first advantage of .gitignore is that it is versioned into the repository itself, unlike .git/info/exclude. The second advantage is that you can have multiple .gitignore files, one per directory/subdirectory, for directory specific ignore rules, unlike .git/info/exclude.

So the .gitignore files are versioned and present across all clones of the repository. Therefore, in large teams all people are ignoring the same kind of files (e.g. *.db, *.log); and using several .gitignore files allow for more specific ignore rules.

.git/info/exclude is available for individual clones only. It is not versioned, hence what one person ignores in their clone is not available/present in another person's clone. For example, if someone uses Eclipse for development, it may make sense for that developer to add .build folder to .git/info/exclude because other devs may not be using Eclipse.

In general, files/ignore rules that have to be universally ignored should go in .gitignore, and otherwise files that you want to ignore only on your local clone should go into .git/info/exclude.

Answer 2

Googled : 3 ways of excluding files

1. .gitignore applies to every clone of this repository (versioned, everyone will have it),
2. .git/info/exclude only applies to your local copy of this repository (local, not shared with others),
3. ~/.gitignore applies to all the repositories on your computer (local, not shared with others).

3. actually requires to set a configuration on your computer :

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

Answer 3

Use .gitignore for ignore rules that are specific to the project. Use exclude or a global ignore file for ignore rules that are specific to your environment.

For example, my global ignore files ignore the temp files generated by whatever editor I’m using—that rule is specific to my environment, and might be different for some other developer on the same project (perhaps they use a different editor). OTOH, my project .gitignore files ignore things like API keys and build artifacts—those are for the project, and should be the same for everyone on the project.

Does that help?

Answer 4

Just to offer our (real world) experience: we started using .git/info/exclude when we had to customize some config files on each development environment but still wanted the source to be maintained in the repo and available to other developers.

This way, the local files, once cloned and modified can be excluded from commits without affecting the original files in the repo but without necessarily being ignored in the repo either.