Git Ignores and Maven targets

Question

Anyone know if it is possible to ignore all the instances of a particular directory in a file structure managed by git.

I'm looking to exclude all the 'target' folders in a maven project with a number of submodules. I know I can explicitly exclude each of them in a top level .gitignore, but I'd really like to be able to specify a pattern like **/target/* there to have it automatically ignore the instance in sub directories?

Is this possible?

tia,

ste

Answer 1

It is possible to use patterns in a .gitignore file. See the gitignore man page. The pattern */target/* should ignore any directory named target and anything under it.

Answer 2

The .gitignore file in the root directory does apply to all subdirectories. Mine looks like this:

.classpath
.project
.settings/
target/

This is in a multi-module maven project. All the submodules are imported as individual eclipse projects using m2eclipse. I have no further .gitignore files. Indeed, if you look in the gitignore man page:

Patterns read from a .gitignore file in the same directory as the path, or in any parent directory…

So this should work for you.