siong1987

Every time, once you create a new Rails application on a Git resipotary, you have to create a .gitignore file to make sure that Git will ignore certain files that it should not keep track. For examples,

log/*.log
tmp/**/*
.DS_Store
doc/api
doc/app

These are the static and dynamic files that Rails creates. So, I create a simple ruby script into my bin directory so that I can just use a simple command to create this .gitignore file easily.

Firstly, in terminal, under your home directory, change your directory into “bin” subdirectory. Create a text file called “gitignore”. Inside the file, use your favorite text editor, write:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# create .gitignore

f = File.new(".gitignore", "w")
f.write("log/*.log\n")
f.write("tmp/**/*\n")
f.write(".DS_Store\n")
f.write("doc/api\n")
f.write("doc/app\n")
f.close

puts ".gitignore created."

Save the file and close your text editor. Then, chmod the “gitignore” file:

chmod a+x gitignore

So, now, every time, after you create a Rails application with the “rails” command, change directory into your Rails application’s directory, fire the “gitignore” command, the .gitignore file will be created automatically.

Happy Gitting.

If you are hardcore Textmate user, you may feel annoyed everytime when you fire the “git commit -a” command. The default editor used by Git is Vim. By applying a small change, you can change the default editor to Textmate instead of Vim.

In Terminal, type:

git config core.editor "mate -w"

Now, you are done. You have changed the default editor in Git to Textmate. Besides that, you can in fact use this command:

git commit -a -m "Hi I am a hardcore Textmate user."

This command will automatically add the new commit message “Hi I am a hardcore Textmate user.” to your new commit instead of firing up an editor to write your commit message.

Happy Gitting!