Creating the Git ignore file

If you are using Git—the most popular distributed version control system—ignoring some files and folders from version control is much easier than with Subversion.

Getting ready

Make sure that your Django project is under the Git version control.

How to do it...

Using your favorite text editor, create a .gitignore file at the root of your Django project, and put the following files and directories there:

# .gitignore
# Project files and directories
/myproject/static/
/myproject/tmp/
/myproject/media/
# Byte-compiled / optimized / DLL files
__pycache__/
*.py[cod]
*$py.class
# C extensions
*.so
# PyInstaller
*.manifest
*.spec
# Installer logs
pip-log.txt
pip-delete-this-directory.txt
# Unit test / coverage reports
htmlcov/
.tox/
.coverage
.coverage.*
.cache
nosetests.xml
coverage.xml
*.cover
# Translations
*.pot
# Django stuff:
*.log
# Sphinx documentation
docs/_build/
# PyBuilder
target/

How it works...

The .gitignore file specifies patterns that should intentionally be untracked by the 
Git version control system. The .gitignore file that we created in this recipe will ignore the Python-compiled files, local settings, collected static files, temporary directory for uploads, 
and media directory with the uploaded files.

If you keep all of your settings in a config Python package, as described in the Configuring settings for development, testing, staging, and production environments recipe, add settings.py to the ignored files too.

There's more...

With Git ignore files, we have the ability to follow a whitelist pattern rather than a blacklist, which means we can indicate what files we want to include rather than those we should omit. In addition, the patterns given in .gitignore are honored for all levels of the tree below where the file resides, making them extremely powerful. For example, the file could be written in this manner for a Docker project:

# .gitignore
# ignore everything in the root by default
/*
# allow this file of course
!.gitignore
# allowed root directories
!/apps/
!/bin/
!/config/
!/data/
!/project/
!/static/
!/templates/
# allowed root files
!/Dockerfile
!/docker-compose.yml
# files allowed anywhere
!README.md
# specifically ignore certain deeper items
__pycache__/

See also

• The Creating a virtual environment project file structure recipe
• The Creating a Docker project file structure recipe
• The Setting the Subversion ignore property recipe