gitignore_lib

This library (and simple CLI application) parses and applies rules from .gitignore files. It can be used to provide gitignore-like functionality to your applications with a familiar syntax and behavior.

Installation

It is available on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/gitignore-lib/. So use the default Python ways:

pip install gitignore_lib

If you are interested in using the CLI tool (it is not very exciting, but who knows?), use pipx, uv or something similar:

pipx install gitignore_lib

Basic usage

Just open a .gitignore file and use the resulting object to match paths against the rules. For example:

from gitignore import load # it also offers loads(), dump() and dumps()

ignore = load(".gitignore", base="/path/to/repo")
ignore("some/path/to/file.txt") # True, if the file is ignored

The ignore object also provides methods for filesystem traversal. For instance, the walk() method behaves similarly to Path.walk() from pathlib:

for dirpath, dirnames, filenames  in ignore.walk("/path/to/repo"):
    for file in filenames:
        print(dirpath / file) # non-ignored files only!

If you want to learn more, check the documentation.