---
title: >
  Debugging gitignore rules
pubDate: 2022-12-28
permalink: >-
  daily/2022/12/28/debugging-gitignore-rules
tags:
  - git
---

Have you wondered why a file or directory is being ignored in your Git repository and isn't appearing when you run `git status`?

Maybe you have multiple `.gitignore` files and you don't know which is causing the issue, or you ignore everything and explicitly unignore the files that you want to add.

## `check-ignore` to the rescue

`git check-ignore` accepts a list of paths and checks if each is ignored.

There's also a `--verbose` option that will tell you which `.gitignore` file is causing it to be ignored as well as the line number and the pattern - great information for debugging, and no more force adding files.