.gitignore Generator

A .gitignore file is the bouncer at the door of your repository: it lists the files and folders Git should never track. The things you want it to keep out fall into a few buckets — dependencies you can reinstall (node_modules/, vendor/, venv/), build output you can regenerate (dist/, target/, bin/), logs and temporary files, editor and OS clutter (.DS_Store, .idea/, .vscode/), and most importantly secrets like .env files that must never be shared. Keeping these out matters for more than tidiness: it shrinks your repo, avoids noisy diffs, prevents conflicts over machine-specific files, and stops credentials from leaking into a place they are very hard to fully remove from later.

Each line in the file is a pattern matched against paths in your project. A bare name like *.log ignores every matching file anywhere; a trailing slash like build/ matches a directory and everything in it; a leading slash anchors the pattern to the repo root. The asterisk is a wildcard, and — usefully — a leading ! un-ignores an exception, which is how the VS Code template here ignores the whole .vscode/ folder but keeps a few shared settings files. This generator merges the templates you pick and strips duplicate lines where they overlap, so you get one coherent file rather than a pile of repeated rules. One thing to remember: .gitignore only governs files Git is not already tracking. If something was committed before you ignored it, Git keeps tracking it until you remove it from the index with git rm --cached — and if a secret was ever committed, ignoring it now does not erase it from history, so rotate it.

Pick the languages, frameworks, operating systems, and editors your project uses; the merged, de-duplicated .gitignore builds instantly. Everything runs in your browser — the templates are bundled with the page and nothing is uploaded. Pair it with the robots.txt Generator for your site’s crawl rules, or generate types from sample data with JSON to TypeScript.