When I create a new rails app, I’m constantly going back to another project and stealing the .gitignore file from it to make sure that git doesn’t know about certain files rails either updates frequently, or stores machine-specific data in. The latter is generally just config/database.yml, because I develop alongside my colleagues at Brightbox and we deploy via capistrano, we always put the database.yml file in the shared directory on the server, so we each have our own version with our local credentials in it locally. And thus we don’t want it to be tracked by git.

Here’s what I’ve collated from various sources over the few weeks I’ve been using git + rails everyday.

.gitignore

config/database.yml
log/*.log
tmp/*

# OS X only
.DS_Store
**/.DS_Store

Then to make sure log/ and tmp/ are tracked, convention is to add a blank .gitkeep file in them.

touch log/.gitkeep
touch tmp/.gitkeep