.gitignore Generator

Tick the languages, tools and editors your project actually touches, get a ready-to-paste .gitignore back. Same idea as the well-known github/gitignore templates, just picked from a checklist instead of hunting down and concatenating multiple template files by hand.

Why a good .gitignore matters more than it looks like it should

Committing node_modules/ once, by accident, on a large project is a genuinely painful thing to undo cleanly from git history later — it bloats every clone forever unless someone does a history rewrite, which is disruptive for every other contributor's local repo. A `.gitignore` in place from the very first commit is one of those small pieces of project hygiene that's nearly free to get right at the start and meaningfully annoying to fix after the fact.

What actually belongs in here, beyond build artifacts

Build output and dependency folders are the obvious ones, but the category that actually matters for security is secrets: .env files, private keys, anything with real credentials in it. Committing a .env file with real API keys or database credentials to a public repo is a startlingly common way credentials leak — GitHub's own secret scanning exists specifically because this happens constantly, not as a rare edge case. Get the ignore pattern in from commit one, and pair it with a checked-in .env.example containing dummy values so new contributors know what variables they need to set without ever seeing the real ones.

The one thing gitignore genuinely can't do

If a file is already tracked by git, adding it to `.gitignore` afterward doesn't remove it from history — it only stops new changes to it from showing up as tracked going forward. If credentials or a large binary already got committed, they're still sitting in every clone's git history until someone actively rewrites it (`git filter-repo`, or GitHub's own secret-purging tooling for exposed credentials) — and if it was a real credential, rotating it is the actually urgent step, since the old value has to be treated as compromised the moment it was pushed, history rewrite or not.