Unexpectedly many notifications on VS Code Source Control

Question

I am a beginner developer, and today I deployed my first Python web app (from GitHub to Heroku). This was basically my process:

• I tried using this tutorial many times to do it, but it wouldn't work. I used commands like git add .,git commit -m, and git push heroku master multiple times to try it out, but it wouldn't work.
• In the end, I did it through the Heroku website itself by deploying the main branch. Here's the repo.

When I opened VS Code the next time, I saw 5 thousand notifications in the Source Control tab. Is this normal? Is it safe to discard all these changes?

Here's a screenshot

Answer 1

These are not really notifications, they are new files which have not been commited to Git yet (unstaged files).

These files are the output of your project's build process. You don't want to track them in your Git repo, so you will want to add your build directory, along with __pycache__ and probably at least a few others, to your .gitignore file so that Git ignores them.

For reference, here is GitHub's default .gitignore for Python projects. It has 138 lines – you probably don't actually need more than a few of them for your particular project, but it won't do any harm to use the whole file as-is.

You can learn more about ignoring files in Git here.