So I had this problem at work. I’m running a virtualenv instance on our main git repo for all my python packages. The global .gitignore obviously doesn’t know about it the way it knows to filter out node modules and other fun bits of localization and I sure as heck don’t want to add my own one line fix to the global .gitignore file.

So what’s a girl to do? Does she just ignore that one annoying untracked file line every time she does a git status from the terminal? Nope, she uses git exclude.

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$GIT_DIR/info/exclude

So for me this meant I had to create a info folder in my .git folder in the repo. Then I created a file called exclude (no file extension). The syntax in that file is exactly like the .gitignore file, it’s just very very local (to your computer and only for that repo).