How do I prevent Quarto from creating needless .gitignore files?

[aaron-siegel]

Description

Every time I run Quarto, it creates a needless .gitignore file in a subdirectory of my source tree. I already have .quarto and *.quarto_ipynb ignored in my root .gitignore, so the new one serves no purpose. How do I prevent Quarto from creating it?

[mcanouil]

You can't if you are working with Git.
If you don't want Quarto to edit your file, keep its modifications as is.

• Improve how Quarto handles .gitignore to keep it clean #6011

I don't know what you are referring to with "root", but if you are talking about user level gitignore, this makes collaboration on your repositories less likely to end well as your collaborators cannot know what you exclude or not when cloning.

[aaron-siegel]

No I'm not talking about user level .gitignore. My repo has a file .gitignore in the project toplevel folder. It has a subfolder docs/notebooks and when I run Quarto, it creates a docs/notebooks/.gitignore that's redundant with the toplevel .gitignore, which already contains the requisite entries.

If I convert just one notebook (I have my conversion script set up to only convert the notebooks that have changed) then it sometimes creates a docs/notebooks/subfolder/.gitignore and so on. At one point I ended up with four separate .gitignores.

I'm very surprised there's no way to turn this off. I suspect most engineers do not appreciate when tools unnecessarily clutter up their source tree.

I appreciate the link to #6011 but it doesn't seem to actually suggest a solution. Do you know if there's an ETA on it?

[mcanouil]

Quarto creates the file at the root of the Quarto project.
You can add subdirectories gitignore files in your gitignore.
It won't avoid the creation but you won't commit them.

I appreciate the link to #6011 but it doesn't seem to actually suggest a solution. Do you know if there's an ETA on it?

As I said "You can't". I wouldn't have said that if there was a solution.
And no timeline.

[aaron-siegel]

Ok, thanks for your help.

A workaround is to first copy my sources into a target directory and then run quarto from there, so that quarto never sees my source tree. I'll go with that approach for now.