where do i add git confg - - global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore ?

[tangara goh]

Hi guys,

I am in need of help and I have been searching and asking around a few days to no avail.

So, there is this line :

add git confg - - global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore 

that I discovered I need to create according to Stackoverflow and bitbucket tutorial :

define global Git ignore patterns for all repositories on your local system by setting the Git core.excludesFile property.

but it didn't say specific where cos I open up my .gitconfig file :

it shows me :

excludesfile = ~/.config/git/ignore

so the above line obviously didn't work cos when I put .classes/ inside git ignore, commited and pushed, those files still showed up in the repo.

I'd like to confirm do I remove that line above and replace it with

add git confg - - global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore 

and this will resolve the problem of sending .classes/folder up to the repo whenever I push my code up to the repo ?

Tks.

[Stephan van Hulst]

The line that you quoted is not what you should put in the config file, it is a Git command that you use to edit the config from the command line. It's full of errors though.

Why are you messing with global ignores? A repository should instead have a .gitignore file where you specify the files you want to ignore at the repository level.

Note that if you've pushed files to your repository, you must first remove them before you can ignore them.

[Rob Spoor]

I definitely agree with Stephan. If the repository contains a .gitignore, then everybody that clones the repository will use it. People will not accidentally commit files because they don't have the same git ignores.

[Tim Holloway]

One of the nice things about git is that any given project can have two kinds of "ignore" files.

The obvious one is .gitignore. You should use it to keep locally-produced project files out of the repository so that a "push" won't publish them to the master repository and clutter it up.  So .gitignore redlines things like the Maven target directory, backup file from editors and tools ("*.bak" and so forth), and other stuff of that nature.

But often I'll have local files that I don't want either git or .gitignore to know about. These are often to-do list files, scratchpad stuff, temporary data files and so forth. For that, there's another ignore file you can create inside the .git directory. That way you can include the .gitignore file as part of your archive set without polluting it with stuff that no one sharing the project should see.

The "~/.gitignore file" is yet another beastie. The "~" is Unix shorthand for your home directory, and thus it gets applied to ALL projects on your user account. The command that started this thread simply sets the user's git options globally to exclude that file. Or, in other words, to ignore $HOME/.gitignore.

[tangara goh]

Stephan van Hulst wrote:The line that you quoted is not what you should put in the config file, it is a Git command that you use to edit the config from the command line. It's full of errors though.

Why are you messing with global ignores? A repository should instead have a .gitignore file where you specify the files you want to ignore at the repository level.

Note that if you've pushed files to your repository, you must first remove them before you can ignore them.

OK. Tks. I have since put the git ignore at the Users directory where the git config resides.

That git command is not be executed after the above step.

Another way I learnt is that I need to remove it as it is in the cache hence it get  pushed even though there is a git ignore in the local repo.