Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Using .gitignore to ignore files

Git allows for a special .gitignore file that allows us to specify which files Git should ignore. So, create a .gitignore file at the project root directory, and add the following lines:

node_modules/dist/

Now, when we run git status again, node_modules/ and dist/ are gone from our list, and .gitignore is added:

$ git statusUntracked files:  .babelrc  .eslintrc.json  .gitignore  .nvmrc  package.json  src/  yarn.lock

Apart from the node_modules/ and dist/ directories, there will be many other files we'll eventually want Git to ignore; for example, a yarn-error.log is generated whenever yarn encounters an error. It is for our information only and should not be tracked on Git. While we can keep adding more and more ...