gitignore VS git-filter-repo

In conclusion, the Gitignore repository stands as a testament to the power of collective knowledge and collaboration in software development. By providing a centralized repository of .gitignore templates, it empowers developers to streamline their workflow, maintain cleaner repositories, and focus on what they do best – writing exceptional code. As the software development landscape continues to evolve, the significance of .gitignore templates as indispensable tools for developers is set to endure.

The challenge here was actually from my #48in28 Exercism participation, where I am pretty familiar the standard layout for some repositories since I am familiar with tooling and language, working with new languages does not come with the same familiarity, so I found it made sense to use canonical definitions, hence the use of github/gitignore.

Add .env to your .gitignore file to prevent it from being committed. Here's an example file with it already added. You may also use dotenv for advanced configuration and it will automatically load environment variables from a .env file into process.env.

Here you can find ready-made .gitignore templates for various technologies and languages such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, and many others: https://github.com/github/gitignore/tree/main.

You could also use this git ignore template. Create you .gitignore and add the contents from that file in.

I've only used free Unity with GitHub or GitLab, professionally and reaching back into internships. One recommendation would be to use a slightly longer .gitignore than the default, like this one.

Virtual Environments are a feature that has been part of python itself since version 3.3. It allows you to isolate both a python version and any packages you install with it. Every python project I develop with uses a virtual environment for such isolation purposes. Now I generally like to create these virtual environments inside the target project's directory so I know exactly what it's tied to. If you use GitHub's python gitignore file naming the virtual environment folder as venv or .venv will ensure it doesn't get committed (which you don't want). So I'll make a new project folder and create a virtual environment inside of it:

Especially considering the GitHub .gitignore template for Node only ignores .env.local, not .local.env: https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/Node.gitignore...

# Get latest from https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/Unity.gitignore

**WARNING**: git-filter-branch has a glut of gotchas generating mangled history rewrites. Hit Ctrl-C before proceeding to abort, then use an alternative filtering tool such as 'git filter-repo' (https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/) instead. See the filter-branch manual page for more details; to squelch this warning, set FILTER_BRANCH_SQUELCH_WARNING=1. Proceeding with filter-branch... Rewrite a3a48b09e282854c80bf4ad02a017e249e161fd8 (2/8) (0 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted) rm 'config.js' Rewrite 6e788e83a338e45b348d93d682b32c816ee2fbff (3/8) (0 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted) rm 'config.js' Rewrite 7a378a0145bce70bea213ca5f9062138544db5f2 (4/8) (0 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted) rm 'config.js' Rewrite 0637c9659623644cfceb35be10f2a1fe5c468e04 (5/8) (0 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted) rm 'config.js' Rewrite 6c421eb99adc6b987cff7f3cada31e9313638072 (6/8) (0 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted) rm 'config.js' Rewrite 98001e5b97270efa4a8ab5bd0452be56dd76883d (7/8) (0 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted) rm 'config.js' Rewrite 2ca4e161a4af2b8f38c46faf848fdbb3e550f23c (8/8) (0 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted) rm 'config.js' Ref 'refs/heads/secret_keys' was rewritten.

Yup you need https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo Take a look at https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/blob/main/INSTALL.md for instructions

git filter-repo: a third-party command actually, as a replacement to Git's own filter-branch, that allows rewriting the whole history of a repository to remove a mistakenly added file, or help extract part of the repository to another.

I needed to archive some old repositories into a monorepo and of course I gave myself the requirement of maintaining git history, in some way. I tried a couple of solutions but it wasn't until I stumbled upon the git-filter-repo project at https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo and another article which I've since lost (which was badly documented anyway) that I was able to figure out how to do this.

Git objects are not designed to be changed, they are immutable blobs. This is not a problem if you are making a reader, but is a problem when you want to change things, tools like old git-filter-branch or the newer filter repo abstract all reference updating away for you

Make sure your gitignore is setup right (GitHub has a repo of good defaults). If you messed that up, you could rewrite git history to remove the big stuff. Use git-filter-repo. Not sure how that works for LFS.

git-filter-repo

Check out git filter repo https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo

I personally prefer git-bfg ( https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/ ) ... though git-filter-repo ( https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo ) is quite popular. The difference for me was that git-bfg is JVM based and my work machine has Java on it while git-filter-repo is python based... and my work machine is without python.