.gitignore

Used at root of repo to stop large/unnecessary files to be tracked by git respository.

Generally contains workspace setting files (unique to a person's desktop) and image/video files (too large for repo)

*.jpg
*.pdf
*.aux
*.DS_Store # specific to mac

For most languages and frameworks, .gitignore are standardized in this git repo: https://github.com/github/gitignore/tree/main

Untrack Files (and remove from history)

Generally, I (and probably everyone) forgets to make this all inclusive when starting their repository. So you need to remove the cached files to stop current tracking:

$ git rm --cached path/to/file
$ git rm -r --cached folder/

And then you have run git-filter-repo to update history. And then you'll have to force push because history differs.

$ brew install git-filter-repo
$ git filter-repo --path path/to/file --invert-paths
$ git filter-repo --path folder/ --invert-paths