My first day at Planning Center was Monday, September 18th, 2023, and I was not looking forward to re-configuring my development environment. I currently use RubyMine, which generates quite a few files when opening a project for the first time (a mark of shame for a RubyMine user amongst vim users 🤣). Naturally, I created a PR to add the auto-generated .idea directory to the .gitignore file to prevent these files from being committed to version control. Later, I learned that you can have a global .gitignore file on your machine that will prevent the need to update every .gitignore file of every new project that you open 🙌🏼. I stole the following steps from this gist:

1. Create a .gitignore file in your home directory

$ cd
$ touch .gitignore

2. Configure git to recognize it as a global .gitignore file

$ git config --global core.excludesFile ~/.gitignore

3. Update the .gitignore file to include any file paths you want to exclude

# Ignore files auto-generated by JetBrains
.idea/*

4. Confirm that the configuration is correct

$ git config --global core.excludesFile

And that’s it! Cheers to no longer needing to update every .gitignore file of every project 🍻