04-ignoring-files.md

Ignoring Files

Sometimes, you'll have files in your project that you don't want to track with Git. These could be:

• Log files
• Build artifacts
• Files with sensitive information (like API keys)
• Operating system junk files (like .DS_Store on macOS)

You can tell Git to ignore these files by creating a file named .gitignore in your project's root directory.

Each line in the .gitignore file specifies a pattern. For example:

# Ignore log files
*.log

# Ignore build output
/build

# Ignore a specific file
credentials.json

It's a good practice to set up your .gitignore file at the beginning of a project.