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github/gitignore

🔥 Hot★ 173,986Audience · developerComplexity · 1/5ActiveLicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

GitHub's official collection of .gitignore templates for popular languages, frameworks, and tools. Copy a template into your project to automatically exclude build artifacts, logs, and other files Git shouldn't track.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Curated templates
      Excludes build files
      Organized by language
    How to use
      Copy template file
      Customize as needed
      Combine multiple
    Template types
      Root templates
      Global templates
      Community templates
    Use cases
      New project setup
      IDE config exclusion
      OS file exclusion

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Start a new project by copying the matching language template into your .gitignore file to automatically exclude build artifacts and dependencies.

USE CASE 2

Combine a language template with a Global template to exclude IDE-specific files like .vscode or .idea folders across all your projects.

USE CASE 3

Find specialized templates for less common tools and frameworks in the community folder when the root templates don't match your tech stack.

Tech stack

Git

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
Use freely for any purpose without attribution or restrictions; you can copy, modify, and distribute these templates however you want.

In plain English

This repository is GitHub's official collection of useful .gitignore templates. A .gitignore file tells Git, the version control system most developers use, which files in a project should be left out of source control. Typical examples are build artifacts, logs, dependency folders, IDE config files, and operating-system files like macOS's .DS_Store: things you don't want cluttering up your repository or getting accidentally committed. It works by storing a set of curated template files, organized into three groups. The root folder contains common-use templates for popular programming languages and technologies, designed to give a sensible starting point. The Global folder contains templates for editors, tools, and operating systems that you can either add to your machine-wide global ignore configuration or merge into a project-specific template. The community folder contains specialized templates for other languages, tools, and projects that don't fit the mainstream set, and is also where versioned variants of mainstream templates live so older projects can still find a matching template. GitHub itself uses this list to populate the .gitignore template chooser shown when you create a new repository on github.com. You'd use this whenever you start a new project, copy the template that matches your language or framework into a .gitignore file at the root, optionally combine it with a Global template, and customize from there. The README also describes contribution rules: each template should contain rules specific to a language, framework, or tool, and the project explicitly does not aim to cover every tool ever made. The repo is essentially a curated set of plain-text .gitignore files, licensed under CC0-1.0, meaning you can use them freely without attribution.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I'm starting a new Node.js project. Show me how to use the github/gitignore repo to set up a .gitignore file that excludes node_modules and build artifacts.
Prompt 2
I use VS Code and Python. How do I combine templates from the github/gitignore repo to exclude both Python cache files and editor config?
Prompt 3
My team uses a custom framework not in the root templates. How do I find or create a .gitignore template in the github/gitignore community folder?
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Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.