What is .gitignore exactly?

.gitignore tells git which files (or patterns) it should ignore. It’s usually used to avoid committing transient files from your working directory that aren’t useful to other collaborators, such as compilation products, temporary files IDEs create, etc. You can find the full details here.

git: How to ignore all present untracked files?

As already been said, to exclude from status just use: If you instead want to permanently ignore currently untracked files you can, from the root of your project, launch: Every subsequent call to git status will explicitly ignore those files. UPDATE: the above command has a minor drawback: if you don’t have a .gitignore file … Read more

How can I Remove .DS_Store files from a Git repository?

Remove existing files from the repository: Add this line: to the file .gitignore, which can be found at the top level of your repository (or create the file if it isn’t there already). You can do this easily with this command in the top directory: Then commit the file to the repo: