pygic 1.0.0

A command line tool for generating .gitignore files.

pygic: Python .gitignore creator

pygic is a command line tool for generating gitignores. It is heavily inspired from gitignore.io and gig. Similar projects are pygig and pygi.

Main differences with pygig

• pygig does not use the gitignores from gitignore.io.
• pygig requires git if we want to update its pre-downloaded gitignores.

Main difference with pygi

• pygi cannot be used offline since it is a wrapper around the gitignore.io API.

Main differences with gig

• gig is written in Go so it cannot be used as a Python library.
• gig requires git installed to download the gitignores from toptal/gitignore the first time it is ran.
• gig search functionality depends on fzf.
• gig can be easily installed on MacOS or if you have Go installed. Otherwise, you need to manually install its pre-built binaries.

What makes pygic stand out

• All you need is uv installed, not even Python.
• pygic can be used offline as the gitignores from toptal/gitignore are pre-downloaded.
• You don't need git installed since cloning can be handled by dulwich.
• The search functionality does not depend on fzf, but uses pzp which is a Python tool.

Other remarks

• pygic does not support the autogen command from gig since it is experimental does not seem very useful.
• Similar to gig, the content of the gitignores match the ones from gitignore.io, except for the order of the stacks which is not standardized by gitignore.io. Here, we choose the alphabetical order.
• Finally pygic fixes what seems to be a small bug in gitignore.io's implementation where they remove all duplicated lines in the generated gitignores, even in comments. pygic only removes uncommented duplicated lines.

Install

uv

The easiest way to install pygic is to use uv as a Python tool manager. You can install uv with the following command:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

For more information, check out uv's documentation.

Since pygic is on PyPI, once uv is installed, all you have to do to install pygic as a CLI tool is:

uv tool install pygic

If you want to be able to update the gitignore by using the last ones on toptal/gitignore, you can install pygic with the [git] extra:

uv tool install pygic[git]

The [git] extra requires git. If you don't want to install git, you can still clone the toptal/gitignore repository thanks to dulwich (a Python implementation of git), with the [dulwich] extra:

uv tool install pygic[dulwich]

If you want to use pygic search, you can install pygic with the [search] extra:

uv tool install pygic[search]

Finally, if you want all extras, you can install pygic like this:

uv tool install pygic[all]

Usage

The usage is similar to gig.

Generating a gitignore via available arguments

$ pygic gen python opencv
### OpenCV ###
#OpenCV for Mac and Linux
#build and release folders
*/CMakeFiles
*/CMakeCache.txt
*/Makefile
*/cmake_install.cmake
.DS_Store

### Python ###
# Byte-compiled / optimized / DLL files
__pycache__/
*.py[cod]
*$py.class
...

And to directly create a .gitignore file with the previous example, run:

pygic gen python opencv > .gitignore

Using the search functionality

The search functionality allows you to search amongst the available arguments and finally generates a gitignore with the selected arguments.

pygic search

For more information, see

pygic --help

Development

uv

This project uses uv as virtual environment and package manager.

To contribute, all you have to do is clone, then run:

uv venv
uv sync --all-extras