Accurate gitignore generator

[KaKi87]

Project description

.gitignore generators outputs all potentially applicable rules, relying on a project's language or platform, whether those will be used or not.

An accurate generator would only include useful ones for a project.

At first glance, here are two ways of doing this.

• Dirty : output rules from existing generators, filter out those which won't have any effect (i.e. path does not exist) ;

• Clean : output rules from smart detections of dev tools and dependencies.

Relevant Technology

The generator must use a language or platform that can run :

• on any operating system ;

• alongside any other installed language, platform or dev tool ;

• ideally without any dependency.

The generator would ideally support all languages and platforms that could benefit from it.

Complexity and required time

Complexity

• Beginner - This project requires no or little prior knowledge of the technolog(y|ies) specified to contribute to the project
• Intermediate - The user should have some prior knowledge of the technolog(y|ies) to the point where they know how to use it, but not necessarily all the nooks and crannies of the technology
• Advanced - The project requires the user to have a good understanding of all components of the project to contribute

Required time (ETA)

• Little work - A couple of days
• Medium work - A week or two
• Much work - The project will take more than a couple of weeks and serious planning is required

Categories

• Mobile app
• IoT
• Web app
• Frontend/UI
• AI/ML
• APIs/Backend
• Voice Assistant
• Developer Tooling
• Extension/Plugin/Add-On
• Design/UX
• AR/VR
• Bots
• Security
• Blockchain
• Futuristic Tech/Something Unique

[yasinatesim]

What is the scope of this task? Doing something like the tool in this link ?

When I saw this idea, I thought it was a project that automatically creates a .gitignore file via the command line.
For example, fetching the technologies from files in this repository and creating a .gitignore file.

[KaKi87]

The projects you're referring to are the ones which I call inaccurate, although a dirty implementation of my proposal could be based on those.

It could be a CLI, and/or an IDE plugin.

[Idrinth]

I'm not quite sure how that detection should work. For example detecting an ide does not mean a specific project is opened with it.
Otherwise interesting

[yasinatesim]

@Idrinth there are solutions that are considered dirty, for example

For the clean solution, it seems to me that this situation can be solved with project-based plugins. For example, if it is a Next js project, only the lines related to Next should be brought from the fetch project Node .gitignore. This should be done for every language and technology, and in-app plugins should be making by providing contribution. 🤔

[KaKi87]

detecting an ide does not mean a specific project is opened with it

Opening a project in an IntelliJ IDE creates an .idea directory at the project's root, opening a project in Visual Studio Code creates a .vscode directory at the project's root.

[Idrinth]

And half the time(ok, often, but maybe not that often) someone committed that and it's opened by something else, let's say sublime text

[KaKi87]

What's the issue then ? If the developer uses Sublime Text, there will be nothing related to that choice that requires any .gitignore update

[bepisdev]

There is a boiled down concept here that actually makes alot of sense - Have a CLI that communicates with the files in githubs template repo. Have the user select a template from a menu, that will generate the "dirty" ignore file. After this simply read the new file line by line and test if the path exists, if its not, cut that line out of the file. I'd be happy to work on this project if anyone else is keen.

EDIT: Just to extend upon this idea -- That loop would also use something like a lookup table that would match the string to a "handler" function. which would in turn implement rules / actions / checks to be performed should that string be in the ignore file.

[KaKi87]

Suggestion : before asking the user to select which gitignore files to use, filter out from the list those that already doesn't output any match.

[bepisdev]

Suggestion : before asking the user to select which gitignore files to use, filter out from the list those that already doesn't output any match.

My only concern there is CPU Cycles. There would need to be a very efficient algorithm to sort & checking potentially millions of lines of text, against a recursive scan of the current working dir.
it could become a very memory heavy process very quickly. Especially if we're talking about larger projects like a Ruby on Rails or JHipster project for example, rather large codebases (many files) and
for every line in the gitignore we need to check against each individual file.

[KaKi87]

Not if you put the working directory content in an array first, then check it against the gitignore files.

[bepisdev]

Not if you put the working directory content in an array first, then check it against the gitignore files.

Thats actually the exact process I had in my head when I wrote that. Got to remember, lets say for each item in the array (that represents a file in the working directory tree) we need to make a call out to a function or something that either magically has every line from every file in this repo stored and sorted so we know what matches are relevant to what theme/framework/whatever OR We make a HTTP call to read each one of the files and see if we get matches that way. But that match that we do get needs to be stored as not only a match, but a match from Foo.gitignore (For Example).

And we need to repeat that for every file in the current project. You either end up with a very large install size because misc data that we may need, or we have high bandwidth usage because of the HTTP calls.

If you have a different solution im all ears haha.