GITATTRIBUTES(5)                                              GITATTRIBUTES(5)



NAME
       gitattributes - defining attributes per path

SYNOPSIS
       $GIT_DIR/info/attributes, .gitattributes


DESCRIPTION
       A gitattributes file is a simple text file that gives attributes to
       pathnames.


       Each line in gitattributes file is of form:

       pattern attr1 attr2 ...


       That is, a pattern followed by an attributes list, separated by
       whitespaces. When the pattern matches the path in question, the
       attributes listed on the line are given to the path.


       Each attribute can be in one of these states for a given path:


       Set    The path has the attribute with special value "true"; this is
              specified by listing only the name of the attribute in the
              attribute list.


       Unset  The path has the attribute with special value "false"; this is
              specified by listing the name of the attribute prefixed with a
              dash - in the attribute list.


       Set to a value
              The path has the attribute with specified string value; this is
              specified by listing the name of the attribute followed by an
              equal sign = and its value in the attribute list.


       Unspecified
              No pattern matches the path, and nothing says if the path has or
              does not have the attribute, the attribute for the path is said
              to be Unspecified.


              When more than one pattern matches the path, a later line
              overrides an earlier line. This overriding is done per
              attribute. The rules how the pattern matches paths are the same
              as in .gitignore files; see gitignore(5).


              When deciding what attributes are assigned to a path, git
              consults $GIT_DIR/info/attributes file (which has the highest
              precedence), .gitattributes file in the same directory as the
              path in question, and its parent directories up to the toplevel
              of the work tree (the further the directory that contains
              .gitattributes is from the path in question, the lower its
              precedence). Finally global and system-wide files are considered
              (they have the lowest precedence).


              If you wish to affect only a single repository (i.e., to assign
              attributes to files that are particular to one user&#8217;s
              workflow for that repository), then attributes should be placed
              in the $GIT_DIR/info/attributes file. Attributes which should be
              version-controlled and distributed to other repositories (i.e.,
              attributes of interest to all users) should go into
              .gitattributes files. Attributes that should affect all
              repositories for a single user should be placed in a file
              specified by the core.attributesfile configuration option (see
              git-config(1)). Attributes for all users on a system should be
              placed in the $(prefix)/etc/gitattributes file.


              Sometimes you would need to override an setting of an attribute
              for a path to unspecified state. This can be done by listing the
              name of the attribute prefixed with an exclamation point !.


EFFECTS
       Certain operations by git can be influenced by assigning particular
       attributes to a path. Currently, the following operations are
       attributes-aware.


   Checking-out and checking-in
       These attributes affect how the contents stored in the repository are
       copied to the working tree files when commands such as git checkout and
       git merge run. They also affect how git stores the contents you prepare
       in the working tree in the repository upon git add and git commit.


       This attribute enables and controls end-of-line normalization. When a
       text file is normalized, its line endings are converted to LF in the
       repository. To control what line ending style is used in the working
       directory, use the eol attribute for a single file and the core.eol
       configuration variable for all text files.


       Set    Setting the text attribute on a path enables end-of-line
              normalization and marks the path as a text file. End-of-line
              conversion takes place without guessing the content type.


       Unset  Unsetting the text attribute on a path tells git not to attempt
              any end-of-line conversion upon checkin or checkout.


       Set to string value "auto"
              When text is set to "auto", the path is marked for automatic
              end-of-line normalization. If git decides that the content is
              text, its line endings are normalized to LF on checkin.


       Unspecified
              If the text attribute is unspecified, git uses the core.autocrlf
              configuration variable to determine if the file should be
              converted.


              Any other value causes git to act as if text has been left
              unspecified.


              This attribute sets a specific line-ending style to be used in
              the working directory. It enables end-of-line normalization
              without any content checks, effectively setting the text
              attribute.


       Set to string value "crlf"
              This setting forces git to normalize line endings for this file
              on checkin and convert them to CRLF when the file is checked
              out.


       Set to string value "lf"
              This setting forces git to normalize line endings to LF on
              checkin and prevents conversion to CRLF when the file is checked
              out.


              For backwards compatibility, the crlf attribute is interpreted
              as follows:

              crlf            text
              -crlf           -text
              crlf=input      eol=lf





              While git normally leaves file contents alone, it can be
              configured to normalize line endings to LF in the repository
              and, optionally, to convert them to CRLF when files are checked
              out.


              Here is an example that will make git normalize .txt, .vcproj
              and .sh files, ensure that .vcproj files have CRLF and .sh files
              have LF in the working directory, and prevent .jpg files from
              being normalized regardless of their content.

              *.txt           text
              *.vcproj        eol=crlf
              *.sh            eol=lf
              *.jpg           -text





              Other source code management systems normalize all text files in
              their repositories, and there are two ways to enable similar
              automatic normalization in git.


              If you simply want to have CRLF line endings in your working
              directory regardless of the repository you are working with, you
              can set the config variable "core.autocrlf" without changing any
              attributes.

              [core]
                      autocrlf = true





              This does not force normalization of all text files, but does
              ensure that text files that you introduce to the repository have
              their line endings normalized to LF when they are added, and
              that files that are already normalized in the repository stay
              normalized.


              If you want to interoperate with a source code management system
              that enforces end-of-line normalization, or you simply want all
              text files in your repository to be normalized, you should
              instead set the text attribute to "auto" for all files.

              *       text=auto





              This ensures that all files that git considers to be text will
              have normalized (LF) line endings in the repository. The
              core.eol configuration variable controls which line endings git
              will use for normalized files in your working directory; the
              default is to use the native line ending for your platform, or
              CRLF if core.autocrlf is set.


              Note

              When text=auto normalization is enabled in an existing
              repository, any text files containing CRLFs should be
              normalized. If they are not they will be normalized the next
              time someone tries to change them, causing unfortunate
              misattribution. From a clean working directory:


       $ echo "* text=auto" >>.gitattributes
       $ rm .git/index     # Remove the index to force git to
       $ git reset         # re-scan the working directory
       $ git status        # Show files that will be normalized
       $ git add -u
       $ git add .gitattributes
       $ git commit -m "Introduce end-of-line normalization"





       If any files that should not be normalized show up in git status, unset
       their text attribute before running git add -u.

       manual.pdf      -text





       Conversely, text files that git does not detect can have normalization
       enabled manually.

       weirdchars.txt  text





       If core.safecrlf is set to "true" or "warn", git verifies if the
       conversion is reversible for the current setting of core.autocrlf. For
       "true", git rejects irreversible conversions; for "warn", git only
       prints a warning but accepts an irreversible conversion. The safety
       triggers to prevent such a conversion done to the files in the work
       tree, but there are a few exceptions. Even though...


       o
           git add itself does not touch the files in the work tree, the next
          checkout would, so the safety triggers;

       o
           git apply to update a text file with a patch does touch the files
          in the work tree, but the operation is about text files and CRLF
          conversion is about fixing the line ending inconsistencies, so the
          safety does not trigger;

       o
           git diff itself does not touch the files in the work tree, it is
          often run to inspect the changes you intend to next git add. To
          catch potential problems early, safety triggers.

       When the attribute ident is set for a path, git replaces $Id$ in the
       blob object with $Id:, followed by the 40-character hexadecimal blob
       object name, followed by a dollar sign $ upon checkout. Any byte
       sequence that begins with $Id: and ends with $ in the worktree file is
       replaced with $Id$ upon check-in.


       A filter attribute can be set to a string value that names a filter
       driver specified in the configuration.


       A filter driver consists of a clean command and a smudge command,
       either of which can be left unspecified. Upon checkout, when the smudge
       command is specified, the command is fed the blob object from its
       standard input, and its standard output is used to update the worktree
       file. Similarly, the clean command is used to convert the contents of
       worktree file upon checkin.


       A missing filter driver definition in the config is not an error but
       makes the filter a no-op passthru.


       The content filtering is done to massage the content into a shape that
       is more convenient for the platform, filesystem, and the user to use.
       The key phrase here is "more convenient" and not "turning something
       unusable into usable". In other words, the intent is that if someone
       unsets the filter driver definition, or does not have the appropriate
       filter program, the project should still be usable.


       For example, in .gitattributes, you would assign the filter attribute
       for paths.

       *.c     filter=indent





       Then you would define a "filter.indent.clean" and
       "filter.indent.smudge" configuration in your .git/config to specify a
       pair of commands to modify the contents of C programs when the source
       files are checked in ("clean" is run) and checked out (no change is
       made because the command is "cat").

       [filter "indent"]
               clean = indent
               smudge = cat





       For best results, clean should not alter its output further if it is
       run twice ("clean&#8594;clean" should be equivalent to "clean"), and
       multiple smudge commands should not alter clean's output
       ("smudge&#8594;smudge&#8594;clean" should be equivalent to "clean").
       See the section on merging below.


       The "indent" filter is well-behaved in this regard: it will not modify
       input that is already correctly indented. In this case, the lack of a
       smudge filter means that the clean filter must accept its own output
       without modifying it.


       Sequence "%f" on the filter command line is replaced with the name of
       the file the filter is working on. A filter might use this in keyword
       substitution. For example:

       [filter "p4"]
               clean = git-p4-filter --clean %f
               smudge = git-p4-filter --smudge %f





       In the check-in codepath, the worktree file is first converted with
       filter driver (if specified and corresponding driver defined), then the
       result is processed with ident (if specified), and then finally with
       text (again, if specified and applicable).


       In the check-out codepath, the blob content is first converted with
       text, and then ident and fed to filter.


       If you have added attributes to a file that cause the canonical
       repository format for that file to change, such as adding a
       clean/smudge filter or text/eol/ident attributes, merging anything
       where the attribute is not in place would normally cause merge
       conflicts.


       To prevent these unnecessary merge conflicts, git can be told to run a
       virtual check-out and check-in of all three stages of a file when
       resolving a three-way merge by setting the merge.renormalize
       configuration variable. This prevents changes caused by check-in
       conversion from causing spurious merge conflicts when a converted file
       is merged with an unconverted file.


       As long as a "smudge&#8594;clean" results in the same output as a
       "clean" even on files that are already smudged, this strategy will
       automatically resolve all filter-related conflicts. Filters that do not
       act in this way may cause additional merge conflicts that must be
       resolved manually.


   Generating diff text
       The attribute diff affects how git generates diffs for particular
       files. It can tell git whether to generate a textual patch for the path
       or to treat the path as a binary file. It can also affect what line is
       shown on the hunk header @@ -k,l +n,m @@ line, tell git to use an
       external command to generate the diff, or ask git to convert binary
       files to a text format before generating the diff.


       Set    A path to which the diff attribute is set is treated as text,
              even when they contain byte values that normally never appear in
              text files, such as NUL.


       Unset  A path to which the diff attribute is unset will generate Binary
              files differ (or a binary patch, if binary patches are enabled).


       Unspecified
              A path to which the diff attribute is unspecified first gets its
              contents inspected, and if it looks like text, it is treated as
              text. Otherwise it would generate Binary files differ.


       String Diff is shown using the specified diff driver. Each driver may
              specify one or more options, as described in the following
              section. The options for the diff driver "foo" are defined by
              the configuration variables in the "diff.foo" section of the git
              config file.


              The definition of a diff driver is done in gitconfig, not
              gitattributes file, so strictly speaking this manual page is a
              wrong place to talk about it. However...


              To define an external diff driver jcdiff, add a section to your
              $GIT_DIR/config file (or $HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:

              [diff "jcdiff"]
                      command = j-c-diff





              When git needs to show you a diff for the path with diff
              attribute set to jcdiff, it calls the command you specified with
              the above configuration, i.e. j-c-diff, with 7 parameters, just
              like GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF program is called. See git(1) for
              details.


              Each group of changes (called a "hunk") in the textual diff
              output is prefixed with a line of the form:

              @@ -k,l +n,m @@ TEXT


              This is called a hunk header. The "TEXT" portion is by default a
              line that begins with an alphabet, an underscore or a dollar
              sign; this matches what GNU diff -p output uses. This default
              selection however is not suited for some contents, and you can
              use a customized pattern to make a selection.


              First, in .gitattributes, you would assign the diff attribute
              for paths.

              *.tex   diff=tex





              Then, you would define a "diff.tex.xfuncname" configuration to
              specify a regular expression that matches a line that you would
              want to appear as the hunk header "TEXT". Add a section to your
              $GIT_DIR/config file (or $HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:

              [diff "tex"]
                      xfuncname = "^(\\\\(sub)*section\\{.*)$"





              Note. A single level of backslashes are eaten by the
              configuration file parser, so you would need to double the
              backslashes; the pattern above picks a line that begins with a
              backslash, and zero or more occurrences of sub followed by
              section followed by open brace, to the end of line.


              There are a few built-in patterns to make this easier, and tex
              is one of them, so you do not have to write the above in your
              configuration file (you still need to enable this with the
              attribute mechanism, via .gitattributes). The following built in
              patterns are available:


       o
           bibtex suitable for files with BibTeX coded references.

       o
           cpp suitable for source code in the C and C++ languages.

       o
           csharp suitable for source code in the C# language.

       o
           fortran suitable for source code in the Fortran language.

       o
           html suitable for HTML/XHTML documents.

       o
           java suitable for source code in the Java language.

       o
           objc suitable for source code in the Objective-C language.

       o
           pascal suitable for source code in the Pascal/Delphi language.

       o
           perl suitable for source code in the Perl language.

       o
           php suitable for source code in the PHP language.

       o
           python suitable for source code in the Python language.

       o
           ruby suitable for source code in the Ruby language.

       o
           tex suitable for source code for LaTeX documents.

       You can customize the rules that git diff --word-diff uses to split
       words in a line, by specifying an appropriate regular expression in the
       "diff.*.wordRegex" configuration variable. For example, in TeX a
       backslash followed by a sequence of letters forms a command, but
       several such commands can be run together without intervening
       whitespace. To separate them, use a regular expression in your
       $GIT_DIR/config file (or $HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:

       [diff "tex"]
               wordRegex = "\\\\[a-zA-Z]+|[{}]|\\\\.|[^\\{}[:space:]]+"





       A built-in pattern is provided for all languages listed in the previous
       section.


       Sometimes it is desirable to see the diff of a text-converted version
       of some binary files. For example, a word processor document can be
       converted to an ASCII text representation, and the diff of the text
       shown. Even though this conversion loses some information, the
       resulting diff is useful for human viewing (but cannot be applied
       directly).


       The textconv config option is used to define a program for performing
       such a conversion. The program should take a single argument, the name
       of a file to convert, and produce the resulting text on stdout.


       For example, to show the diff of the exif information of a file instead
       of the binary information (assuming you have the exif tool installed),
       add the following section to your $GIT_DIR/config file (or
       $HOME/.gitconfig file):

       [diff "jpg"]
               textconv = exif





              Note

              The text conversion is generally a one-way conversion; in this
              example, we lose the actual image contents and focus just on the
              text data. This means that diffs generated by textconv are not
              suitable for applying. For this reason, only git diff and the
              git log family of commands (i.e., log, whatchanged, show) will
              perform text conversion. git format-patch will never generate
              this output. If you want to send somebody a text-converted diff
              of a binary file (e.g., because it quickly conveys the changes
              you have made), you should generate it separately and send it as
              a comment in addition to the usual binary diff that you might
              send.



       Because text conversion can be slow, especially when doing a large
       number of them with git log -p, git provides a mechanism to cache the
       output and use it in future diffs. To enable caching, set the
       "cachetextconv" variable in your diff driver&#8217;s config. For
       example:

       [diff "jpg"]
               textconv = exif
               cachetextconv = true





       This will cache the result of running "exif" on each blob indefinitely.
       If you change the textconv config variable for a diff driver, git will
       automatically invalidate the cache entries and re-run the textconv
       filter. If you want to invalidate the cache manually (e.g., because
       your version of "exif" was updated and now produces better output), you
       can remove the cache manually with git update-ref -d
       refs/notes/textconv/jpg (where "jpg" is the name of the diff driver, as
       in the example above).


       If you want to show differences between binary or specially-formatted
       blobs in your repository, you can choose to use either an external diff
       command, or to use textconv to convert them to a diff-able text format.
       Which method you choose depends on your exact situation.


       The advantage of using an external diff command is flexibility. You are
       not bound to find line-oriented changes, nor is it necessary for the
       output to resemble unified diff. You are free to locate and report
       changes in the most appropriate way for your data format.


       A textconv, by comparison, is much more limiting. You provide a
       transformation of the data into a line-oriented text format, and git
       uses its regular diff tools to generate the output. There are several
       advantages to choosing this method:


       1. Ease of use. It is often much simpler to write a binary to text
          transformation than it is to perform your own diff. In many cases,
          existing programs can be used as textconv filters (e.g., exif,
          odt2txt).

       2. Git diff features. By performing only the transformation step
          yourself, you can still utilize many of git&#8217;s diff features,
          including colorization, word-diff, and combined diffs for merges.

       3. Caching. Textconv caching can speed up repeated diffs, such as those
          you might trigger by running git log -p.

       Git usually guesses correctly whether a blob contains text or binary
       data by examining the beginning of the contents. However, sometimes you
       may want to override its decision, either because a blob contains
       binary data later in the file, or because the content, while
       technically composed of text characters, is opaque to a human reader.
       For example, many postscript files contain only ascii characters, but
       produce noisy and meaningless diffs.


       The simplest way to mark a file as binary is to unset the diff
       attribute in the .gitattributes file:

       *.ps -diff





       This will cause git to generate Binary files differ (or a binary patch,
       if binary patches are enabled) instead of a regular diff.


       However, one may also want to specify other diff driver attributes. For
       example, you might want to use textconv to convert postscript files to
       an ascii representation for human viewing, but otherwise treat them as
       binary files. You cannot specify both -diff and diff=ps attributes. The
       solution is to use the diff.*.binary config option:

       [diff "ps"]
         textconv = ps2ascii
         binary = true





   Performing a three-way merge
       The attribute merge affects how three versions of a file are merged
       when a file-level merge is necessary during git merge, and other
       commands such as git revert and git cherry-pick.


       Set    Built-in 3-way merge driver is used to merge the contents in a
              way similar to merge command of RCS suite. This is suitable for
              ordinary text files.


       Unset  Take the version from the current branch as the tentative merge
              result, and declare that the merge has conflicts. This is
              suitable for binary files that do not have a well-defined merge
              semantics.


       Unspecified
              By default, this uses the same built-in 3-way merge driver as is
              the case when the merge attribute is set. However, the
              merge.default configuration variable can name different merge
              driver to be used with paths for which the merge attribute is
              unspecified.


       String 3-way merge is performed using the specified custom merge
              driver. The built-in 3-way merge driver can be explicitly
              specified by asking for "text" driver; the built-in "take the
              current branch" driver can be requested with "binary".


              There are a few built-in low-level merge drivers defined that
              can be asked for via the merge attribute.


       text   Usual 3-way file level merge for text files. Conflicted regions
              are marked with conflict markers <<<<<<<, ======= and >>>>>>>.
              The version from your branch appears before the ======= marker,
              and the version from the merged branch appears after the =======
              marker.


       binary Keep the version from your branch in the work tree, but leave
              the path in the conflicted state for the user to sort out.


       union  Run 3-way file level merge for text files, but take lines from
              both versions, instead of leaving conflict markers. This tends
              to leave the added lines in the resulting file in random order
              and the user should verify the result. Do not use this if you do
              not understand the implications.


              The definition of a merge driver is done in the .git/config
              file, not in the gitattributes file, so strictly speaking this
              manual page is a wrong place to talk about it. However...


              To define a custom merge driver filfre, add a section to your
              $GIT_DIR/config file (or $HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:

              [merge "filfre"]
                      name = feel-free merge driver
                      driver = filfre %O %A %B
                      recursive = binary





              The merge.*.name variable gives the driver a human-readable
              name.


              The &#8216;merge.*.driver` variable&#8217;s value is used to
              construct a command to run to merge ancestor&#8217;s version
              (%O), current version (%A) and the other branches&#8217; version
              (%B). These three tokens are replaced with the names of
              temporary files that hold the contents of these versions when
              the command line is built. Additionally, %L will be replaced
              with the conflict marker size (see below).


              The merge driver is expected to leave the result of the merge in
              the file named with %A by overwriting it, and exit with zero
              status if it managed to merge them cleanly, or non-zero if there
              were conflicts.


              The merge.*.recursive variable specifies what other merge driver
              to use when the merge driver is called for an internal merge
              between common ancestors, when there are more than one. When
              left unspecified, the driver itself is used for both internal
              merge and the final merge.


              This attribute controls the length of conflict markers left in
              the work tree file during a conflicted merge. Only setting to
              the value to a positive integer has any meaningful effect.


              For example, this line in .gitattributes can be used to tell the
              merge machinery to leave much longer (instead of the usual
              7-character-long) conflict markers when merging the file
              Documentation/git-merge.txt results in a conflict.

              Documentation/git-merge.txt     conflict-marker-size=32





   Checking whitespace errors
       The core.whitespace configuration variable allows you to define what
       diff and apply should consider whitespace errors for all paths in the
       project (See git-config(1)). This attribute gives you finer control per
       path.


       Set    Notice all types of potential whitespace errors known to git.
              The tab width is taken from the value of the core.whitespace
              configuration variable.


       Unset  Do not notice anything as error.


       Unspecified
              Use the value of the core.whitespace configuration variable to
              decide what to notice as error.


       String Specify a comma separate list of common whitespace problems to
              notice in the same format as the core.whitespace configuration
              variable.


   Creating an archive
       Files and directories with the attribute export-ignore won&#8217;t be
       added to archive files.


       If the attribute export-subst is set for a file then git will expand
       several placeholders when adding this file to an archive. The expansion
       depends on the availability of a commit ID, i.e., if git-archive(1) has
       been given a tree instead of a commit or a tag then no replacement will
       be done. The placeholders are the same as those for the option
       --pretty=format: of git-log(1), except that they need to be wrapped
       like this: $Format:PLACEHOLDERS$ in the file. E.g. the string
       $Format:%H$ will be replaced by the commit hash.


   Packing objects
       Delta compression will not be attempted for blobs for paths with the
       attribute delta set to false.


   Viewing files in GUI tools
       The value of this attribute specifies the character encoding that
       should be used by GUI tools (e.g. gitk(1) and git-gui(1)) to display
       the contents of the relevant file. Note that due to performance
       considerations gitk(1) does not use this attribute unless you manually
       enable per-file encodings in its options.


       If this attribute is not set or has an invalid value, the value of the
       gui.encoding configuration variable is used instead (See
       git-config(1)).


USING ATTRIBUTE MACROS
       You do not want any end-of-line conversions applied to, nor textual
       diffs produced for, any binary file you track. You would need to
       specify e.g.

       *.jpg -text -diff





       but that may become cumbersome, when you have many attributes. Using
       attribute macros, you can specify groups of attributes set or unset at
       the same time. The system knows a built-in attribute macro, binary:

       *.jpg binary





       which is equivalent to the above. Note that the attribute macros can
       only be "Set" (see the above example that sets "binary" macro as if it
       were an ordinary attribute --- setting it in turn unsets "text" and
       "diff").


DEFINING ATTRIBUTE MACROS
       Custom attribute macros can be defined only in the .gitattributes file
       at the toplevel (i.e. not in any subdirectory). The built-in attribute
       macro "binary" is equivalent to:

       [attr]binary -diff -text





EXAMPLE
       If you have these three gitattributes file:

       (in $GIT_DIR/info/attributes)

       a*      foo !bar -baz

       (in .gitattributes)
       abc     foo bar baz

       (in t/.gitattributes)
       ab*     merge=filfre
       abc     -foo -bar
       *.c     frotz





       the attributes given to path t/abc are computed as follows:


       1. By examining t/.gitattributes (which is in the same directory as the
          path in question), git finds that the first line matches. merge
          attribute is set. It also finds that the second line matches, and
          attributes foo and bar are unset.

       2. Then it examines .gitattributes (which is in the parent directory),
          and finds that the first line matches, but t/.gitattributes file
          already decided how merge, foo and bar attributes should be given to
          this path, so it leaves foo and bar unset. Attribute baz is set.

       3. Finally it examines $GIT_DIR/info/attributes. This file is used to
          override the in-tree settings. The first line is a match, and foo is
          set, bar is reverted to unspecified state, and baz is unset.

       As the result, the attributes assignment to t/abc becomes:

       foo     set to true
       bar     unspecified
       baz     set to false
       merge   set to string value "filfre"
       frotz   unspecified





GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite




                                                              GITATTRIBUTES(5)
