Whether you are new to GIT repositories or an experienced developer, I am sure, at some point in using GIT, you must have come across these annoying .DS_Store files that seem to populate out of nowhere. It is a much apparent problem if you have enabled viewing hidden files.
What are they? DS_Store is a short form for Desktop Service Store that contains attributes of a folder and is created every single time a folder is navigated to. The more you navigate through your program source code, the more .DS_Store files you will end up finding. You can delete them but they will appear again.
I am okay with seeing them on my Mac but when you have an auto deployment script setup for GIT, you prefer not having these useless files on your Linux machine. We use a neat little auto deployment script which gets executed each time new updates are pushed to our repository. We have a repo for each of our business applications so it saves our developers plenty of time navigating their way through FTP programs and updating files through that.
To help address this issue, you can configure GIT globally to ignore .DS_Store files by executing this the following:
git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
OR, if you already pushed some of these .DS_Store files, you can get rid of them from your repo in the following way. Go to the root of your app directory and execute the following command in terminal:
find . -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch
That will get rid of all recognition of .DS_Store in your repo. Next, add the .DS_Store to the ignore list. You can do that by simply creating a .gitignore file. Place the following in the .gitignore file at the root of your app directory.
.DS_Store
Save it as .gitignore and push the changes through. Voila! One less annoying problem to worry about 🙂 I am still giving thought towards publishing the source code for our Auto Deploy script 😉