TL;DR: the best resources for creating a .gitignore template are GitHub’s own well-maintained repo at https://github.com/github/gitignore, and the generator at gitignore.io.

I switched to Git from Subversion recently and have been getting my head around .gitignore templates. My current .gitignore template is simple, yet hopefully broad enough to re-use with few changes across my two primary development tools, Visual Studio 2015 and SQL Server Management Studio.

I’m a fan of having a .gitignore template in each repository – though this does not seem to be universal practice.

I commit the .gitignore template to Git so that other developers who use the repository a) don’t get build artefacts from my machine and b) don’t commit build artefacts like the bin and obj folders, and NuGet and NPM folders. Subversion had a “global ignore pattern” which served a similar purpose but needed to be set up on each machine.

My particular .gitignore template at the bottom of this post is adapted from from https://gist.github.com/tobinharris/114476 and https://gist.github.com/kmorcinek/2710267, and pared down from probably the best resource, gitignore.io (which looks like it uses GitHub’s own .gitignore template): https://www.gitignore.io/api/visualstudio

Some .gitignore templates can be really large. Check out https://gist.github.com/jiahao/8b19775cee3a6d51706acf0a8c0ec376 for comparisons between .gitignore templates from major programming languages.

#Visual Studio files
.vs/
[Bb]in/
[Oo]bj/
*.suo
*.ssms_suo
*.sqlsuo
*.pdb
*.bak
*.user
#Visual Studio conversion files
_UpgradeReport_Files/
Backup*/
UpgradeLog*.xml
UpgradeLog*.htm
#OS
[Tt]humbs.db
.*~
*~
#Subversion
.svn
#Dependency directories
node_modules
bower_components
packages
#Others