Using a .cleanignore File

Git offers a wide range of useful command line verbs besides the “usual” suspects such as add, commit or push/pull. One of them is git clean, which can be used to delete untracked files in a repository. This is useful when you are trying to delete generated files, but can be annoying if your repository contains user specific files which are not in version control. Visual Studio creates directories such as .vs, or files like *.user and launchSettings.json which contain IDE configuration which are only relevant for a specific user. You can exclude these files from git clean using the -x -e <expression> option:

git clean -dfx -e .vs/ -e *.user -e launchSettings.json

These expressions looked similar to the content of a .gitignore file to me, so I added a function to my C# build tool which feeds the content of a .cleanignore file into git clean:

# My .cleanignore file
.vs/
*.user
launchSettings.json

public static void Clean()
{
    var expressions = File.ReadLines(".cleanignore")
        .Select(l => l.Trim())
        .Where(l => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(l) && !l.StartsWith("#"))
        .Select(l => $"-e {l}");

    Git(
        "clean -dfx",
        string.Join(' ', expressions));
}

private static void Git(params string[] arguments)
{
    // Run git using Process.Start
}

You can find the code here.