I started working on a new project using git for version control and eclipse RadRails for version control. Wanting to avoid commiting a whole lot of unnecessary files I looked around for an example .gitignore file for rails apps and came across the following:
log/*.log tmp/**/* tmp/* doc/api doc/app coverage/* public/javascripts/all.js public/stylesheets/all.css public/system Gemfile.lock .bundle
To that I added another entry to exclude the eclipse project file:
.project
So far so good, except that eclipse seemed to be creating a whole lot of extra temporary files that weren't being excluded by the settings above. E.g. things like:
app/views/example/.tmp_index.html.erb.55162~ app/views/example/.tmp_index.html.erb.77831~ app/views/example/.tmp_show.html.erb.88243~ app/views/example/.tmp_update.html.erb.56122~ app/views/example/more/.tmp__mockup.html.erb.7334~ app/views/example/more/.tmp_index.html.erb.97377~ app/views/example/more/.tmp_show.html.erb.52186~
No worries.., I'll just use that double asterix thingy to exclude all .tmp_ files from within my views:
app/views/**/.tmp_*
Nope - no good. The temp files are still there - that ** doesn't seem to be working as expected... One work-around is to list each folder with a */
*/.tmp* */*/.tmp* */*/*/.tmp* etc.
That's not very nice. Why wont the ** work? From digging around on forums it seems there are plenty of other people who are also confused about ** in gitignore. Eventually though I stumbled upon an explanation: As soon as there is a / in the text then gitignore uses a different method of working out the paths. So, don't use / with **
**.tmp_*
That's better - the temp files are now ignored. It pays to be careful though - I'm now excluding .tmp_ from more than just my views. In this case that shouldn't be a problem but it's something to bare in mind.
