If you work on web projects day in and day out, you might want to make sure pesky cruft files don't get accidentally committed when you push code upstream.

A great way to achieve this goal is to create a global git ignore file. To do this, first configure git to read this global git ignore file (you can name it what you want)

$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore\_global

Then edit the ~/.gitignore\_global file and add a few ignore lines:

$ vim ~/.gitignore\_global

Here's what I recommend:

\# Packages 

\*.7z  
\*.dmg  
\*.gz  
\*.iso  
\*.jar  
\*.rar  
\*.tar  
\*.zip

\# Logs and databases

\*.log  
\*.sql  
\*.sqlite

\# OS generated files

.DS\_Store  
.DS\_Store?  
.\_\*  
.Spotlight-V100  
.Trashes  
ehthumbs.db  
Thumbs.db

\# Ignore configuration files that may contain sensitive information.  
sites/\*/\*settings\*.php

\# Ignore paths that contain generated content.

files/  
sites/\*/files  
sites/\*/private

\# Ignore default text files  
robots.txt  
/CHANGELOG.txt  
/COPYRIGHT.txt  
/INSTALL\*.txt  
/LICENSE.txt  
/MAINTAINERS.txt  
/UPGRADE.txt  
/README.txt  
sites/all/README.txt  
sites/all/modules/README.txt  
sites/all/themes/README.txt

\# Ignore everything but the "sites" folder ( for non core developer )  
#.htaccess  
#web.config  
#authorize.php  
#cron.php  
#index.php  
#install.php  
#update.php  
#xmlrpc.php  
#/includes  
#/misc  
#/modules  
#/profiles  
#/scripts  
#/themes