Don’t Ignore Your .gitignore

If you’re using git for version control, don’t forget about the .gitignore file. Anything large and static (like .abfs) or procedurally generated (e.g. plots) you can toss in the .gitignore and you’ll not see it when you commit.

I have tabular data that lives in ./inst/extdata/ is processed by a script and then saved as a .rds in ./data/. Here’s my .gitignore.

.Rproj.user
.Rhistory
.RData
.Ruserdata
# Don't track ABFs -- large and static
*.abf
# Don't track files that are generated from the scripts
/data/*

For more check out git-scm