Ignorify

This is a personal tool that I built to generate gitignore files. It uses snippets based on the GitHub ignore snippets. The snippets, along with configuration files, are stored on the users local machine in ~/.ignorify/.

This project served two purposes: (1) it let me build a utility that I've wanted for a while and (2) it gave me a toy to play around with learning the Rust programming language.

Installation

To install ignorify you will need to have Rust installed. For more information on installing Rust see the Rust installation page.

After you have installed Rust (which should include the cargo utility), you can install ignorify with the following command:

cargo install --git https://github.com/lynnjm7/ignorify

To verify that ignorify has been properly installed you should be able to run

ignorify -V

which should show the ignorify version information.

To complete the installation, run the setup command that is built into the tool. This will run the initiation steps to finish installing ignorify. See the Setup section of this document for more information.

Usage

There are several different ways to use this app. For some instructions use

ignorify --help

Setup

To setup this tool, simply run:

ignorify --init

This will clone the snippets directory down to the proper place in your home directory and perform any other necessary setup tasks. After this init operation has been performed you should be good to create ignore files as described below.

Listing available options

To list the available snippets, use:

ignorify --list

It is relatively trivial to be able to grep through this list to search for a particular snippet. For instance,

ignorify --list | grep c++

Generating gitignore files

To generate a gitignore file, simply type out the options that you would like to include in the ignore file:

ignorify c++ windows linux macos vim emacs 

This will output that generated ignore file to stdout. To create the file use Unix command line redirection. I.e.

ignorify c++ windows linux macos vim emacs > .gitignore

You can also use this to append new snippets to an existing ignore file:

ignorify rust  >> .gitignore 

Disclaimer

I have tested and use this tool on Linux. I haven't tested it on any other operating system. However, I see no reason why it shouldn't work and porting it should be relatively straightforward for the sufficiently tenacious code monkey... But I do not currently have any plans on porting this tool to any other operating system.

License

This project uses the MIT license. Please refer to LICENSE for more details.