How to gitignore Go binaries?

Question

I have a .gitignore file like this:

# no binaries
*/
!*.go/
!.gitignore

I thought */ means to ignore all files in all subdirectories (so every file), !*.go/ means to not-ignore all *.go files in all subdirectories, and !.gitignore means to not ignore .gitignore.

However, the issue I have now is that when I create a new *.go file in a subdirectory, it's now ignored.

How do I correctly gitignore all compiled binaries, but not ignore *.go files?

I now have

**/*  
!**/*.go
!.gitignore

But it still ignores all *.go files in the ch1 directory. Anyone else have ideas?

score 11 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 26 '17 at 00:19

11

This will ignore everything except .go files, and works for subdirectories too:

**/*
!**/*.go
!**/

You may also want to check out this question, which is asking something very similar.

answered Jun 26 '17 at 00:19

Craig Brown

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score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

5

You need to use:

**/*.go

The ** is for ignoring files inside any folder and not only in the current folder.

A minor bug was fixed in git v2.7:

Allow a later !/abc/def to override an earlier /abc that
appears in the same .gitignore file to make it easier to express
everything in /abc directory is ignored, except for ....

From the `.gitignore` documentation:

Two consecutive asterisks (**) in patterns matched against full pathname may have special meaning:

`Leading `**

A leading ** followed by a slash means match in all directories.
For example, **/foo matches file or directory foo anywhere, the same as pattern foo.
**/foo/bar matches file or directory "bar" anywhere that is directly under directory foo.

`Trailing `**

A trailing /** matches everything inside.
For example, abc/** matches all files inside directory abc, relative to the location of the .gitignore file, with infinite depth.

`//`**

A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks then a slash matches zero or more directories.
For example, a/**/b matches a/b, a/x/b, a/x/y/b and so on.

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

1
1

answered Mar 15 '16 at 18:13

CodeWizard

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I substituted `!*.go` with `!**.*.go` but my new *.go files are till ignored – Julien Chien Mar 15 '16 at 18:27
Read the updated content i added based upon this comment – CodeWizard Mar 15 '16 at 18:31
2

I read it, and tried to apply it to no avail. I want to *not* ignore *.go source files, but ignore their binaries (which have no extension) - any more tips? – Julien Chien Mar 16 '16 at 07:48
If the file has no extension it will be hard to exclude it unless you place them all in a certain folder – CodeWizard Mar 16 '16 at 07:54

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 13 '21 at 05:00

By default, the Golang compiler will name your binary after the folder name containing your .go source files. In your IDE you can specify the golang compile command with build opts. In my case I have specified my IDE to run the following when I compile my .go source files on OSX:

"env GOOS=darwin GOARCH=amd64 go build -v -o bin/$(basename $(pwd)) && go test -v && go vet"

Notice that in my go build I specify the binary output path with -o and tell the compiler to write all binaries to the subfolder bin/ in the current directory and to name the binary with the name of the project folder. Then in your .gitignore file located in your project folder, add bin/* and git will ignore all the files in your bin/ subfolder.

How to gitignore Go binaries?

3 Answers3

A minor bug was fixed in git v2.7:

From the .gitignore documentation:

Leading **

Trailing **

/**/

From the `.gitignore` documentation:

`Leading `**

`Trailing `**

`//`**