What is .gitignore exactly?

Question

I just created a Github repository and was wondering what the .gitignore file was for. I started by not creating one, but added one due to the fact that most re

Answer 1

Main purpose of .gitignore – so you avoid adding irrelevant files etc. Git

I have a lot of personal notes / scribbles in certain repositories: they are useful to me but not for anyone else. I would not want it uploaded to github because it would simply confuse everyone who read it. The good thing is that I can ask git to "ignore" those files. The only cost to this approach is that I will not be able to recover those notes if my computer crashes etc.