Initialising git repositories with sensible .gitignore files

.gitignore early, ideally first.

Good practice dictates that you shouldn’t commit operating system files like .DS_Store to your git repositories. It’s easy to avoid this if you initialise and populate your .gitignore file BEFORE commiting anything else. In practice, this is an easy thing to forget to do when you just want to quickly initialise a git repo to commit all the work you’ve being doing.

With the help of Toptal’s wonderful gitignore.io, I’m generally pretty good at adding .gitignore files as my initial commit.

Hooray for Templates!

gitignore.io helps you create sensible .gitignore files by providing templates for different programming languages, IDEs and operating systems.

Once you’ve installed the command line or git aliases (following these instructions), you can get templates using the following command:

gi macos
git ignore macos

Which both return:

# Created by https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/macos,r
# Edit at https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore?templates=macos,r

### macOS ###
# General
.DS_Store
.AppleDouble
.LSOverride

# Icon must end with two \r
Icon

# Thumbnails
._*

# Files that might appear in the root of a volume
.DocumentRevisions-V100
.fseventsd
.Spotlight-V100
.TemporaryItems
.Trashes
.VolumeIcon.icns
.com.apple.timemachine.donotpresent

# Directories potentially created on remote AFP share
.AppleDB
.AppleDesktop
Network Trash Folder
Temporary Items
.apdisk

### macOS Patch ###
# iCloud generated files
*.icloud

### R ###
# History files
.Rhistory
.Rapp.history

# Session Data files
.RData
.RDataTmp

# User-specific files
.Ruserdata

# Example code in package build process
*-Ex.R

# Output files from R CMD build
/*.tar.gz

# Output files from R CMD check
/*.Rcheck/

# RStudio files
.Rproj.user/

# produced vignettes
vignettes/*.html
vignettes/*.pdf

# OAuth2 token, see https://github.com/hadley/httr/releases/tag/v0.3
.httr-oauth

# knitr and R markdown default cache directories
*_cache/
/cache/

# Temporary files created by R markdown
*.utf8.md
*.knit.md

# R Environment Variables
.Renviron

# pkgdown site
docs/

# translation temp files
po/*~

# RStudio Connect folder
rsconnect/

### R.Bookdown Stack ###
# R package: bookdown caching files
/*_files/

# End of https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/macos,r

So, my typical git initalisation goes like this:

# do a bunch of stuff, realise I haven't initialised a repo yet...
git init
git ignore macos,r >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git ci -m "Initial commit with .gitignore"
# now add other files

Wouldn’t it be nice though to combine all of these commands into one single command?

git ginit to init and ignore

Here’s how I define this single command in my git config:

[alias]
    ginit = "!f() { \
       if [ -z \"$1\" ]; then \
         echo \"Usage: git ginit <templates>\nFor available templates: git ignore list\"; \
         return 1; \
       fi; \
       git ignore $@ > .gitignore; \
       head -n 1 .gitignore | sed 's/# Created by/Created .gitignore by/g'; \
       git init; \
       git add .gitignore; \
       git commit -m \"Initial commit with .gitignore\"; \
       echo \"Git repository initialised with .gitignore file\"; \
    }; f"
    ignore = "!gi() { curl -L -s https://www.gitignore.io/api/$@ ;}; gi"

So now instead of git init, I run git ginit macos,r and get:

Created .gitignore by https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/macos,r
Initialized empty Git repository in ~/important-work/.git
[main (root-commit) a51907c] Initial commit with .gitignore
 1 file changed, 91 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitignore
Git repository initialised with .gitignore file