getignore

getignore bootstraps .gitignore files from GitHub gitignore patterns.

Installation

Homebrew users (macOS / OS X)

Homebrew users can install getignore using the following commands:

brew tap gotgenes/homebrew-gotgenes
brew update
brew install getignore

Windows, Linux, and macOS / OS X

Download and unpack a pre-compiled executable from the releases page. Make sure to place the executable in your shell's PATH.

Other platforms

See the Building section, below.

Usage

getignore supports the following commands:

• help
• get
• list

help

You can get help on getignore itself with

getignore help

You can use help to get the full usage information of any other command. For example, to get the full usage of the get command, run

getignore help get

get

Use the get command to obtain gitignore patterns from remote repositories, concatenate their contents, and output them. Simply pass in the names of the ignore files you wish to retrieve.

For example,

getignore get Go.gitignore Global/Vim.gitignore

downloads and concatenates the Go and Vim ignore patterns and writes them to STDOUT.

Note the .gitignore extension on the names optional. Feel free to omit the extension; the previous example could be issued more simply as

getignore get Go Global/Vim

get will add the .gitignore extension for you when retrieving the files. You can use the --suffix flag to choose a different default suffix. If you want no suffix added, pass the empty string (--suffix '').

By default, get downloads the files from the GitHub gitignore patterns repository using the GitHub API v3 Trees endpoint. You can use a different owner, repository name, branch, or combination of all of them via the respective --owner, --repository, and --branch flags. It is also possible to pass in a different API URL via the --base-url flag.

By default, get writes the contents to STDOUT. If you'd like to write the contents directly to a file, you can use the -o option. For example,

getignore get -o .gitignore Go Global/Vim

Would write the contents of the Go and Vim ignore patterns into the .gitignore file in the current working directory (./.gitignore).

When retrieving many ignore patterns, it can be helpful instead to list names in a file, instead. Suppose we create a file names.txt with the following contents:

Go
Node
Global/Vim
Global/macOS

We can get all the patterns in this file by passing it in to get via the --names-file option

getignore get --names-file names.txt

Please see the get usage via getignore help get for explanations of other options available.

list

Use this command to get a listing of available gitignore patterns files from a remote repository and print the listing to STDOUT. This allows users to use standard command line tools to manipulate the command's output. For example, the following command line command can be used to download all the "global" gitignore patterns files:

getignore list | grep Global/ | xargs getignore get

By default, list queries the GitHub gitignore patterns repository using the GitHub API v3 Trees endpoint. You can use a different owner, repository name, branch, or combination of all of them via the respective --owner, --repository, and --branch flags. It is possible to pass in a different API URL via the --base-url flag.

By default, list filters for files that end with the .gitignore suffix, however, you can provide an alternative suffix via the --suffix flag. Alternatively, to list all files in the repository, regardless of suffix, provide an empty string as the value, e.g.

getignore list --suffix ''

Completion

getignore supports completion of the command line for Bash and zsh. If completions were not installed by default, please place the respective completion file in the appropriate location for completion scripts on your system.

Building

make

Testing

Ensure you have testing dependencies with

make dev-install

Then run the tests with

make test