One of my excellent team members showed me a neat little tip a few weeks ago on how to avoid pushing and pulling all those irritating little system and application generated hidden files in my Git repos.

Most of us here (I say “us” but I’ve hardly touched a line of code at the office!) use JetBrains awesome PhpStorm IDE these days, for the super quick text editor and wonderful integrations. So finding out there’s a nice little way to get rid of those pesky files once and for all, I was all too happy to hear!

Simply head over to gitignore.io, enter your operating system, preferred IDE and any tools you might you might use (Composer, Vagrant, etc.), and click the drop-down to “Download”.

Then copy that file to the root of your project, the same location you did “git init”.

This is not just for PhpStorm however, it’s a Git feature that I only found out about by using PhpStorm.