Exclude objects with .gitattributes
26 Nov 2012Not many people know about the incredibly useful .gitattributes file which can be used to tell git how to handle certain files or folders.
One useful use case is when you need to distribute zip/tarballs of your repository but you don’t want to share certain files or folders such as unit tests or build configuration scripts.
In the repository root add a new .gitattributes file and for each file or folder you want to exclude add export-ignore after it:
tests/ export-ignore build.xml export-ignore phpunit.xml export-ignore