Drop a gitignore file as part of project/sln templates

My workflow for creating a new project with dotnet new is generally something like this:

1. mkdir MyNewProject
2. cd MyNewProject
3. dotnet new console
4. git init
5. Browse to github.com/github/gitignore
6. Find VisualStudio.gitignore
7. Click “Raw”
8. Copy the content
9. Edit a new .gitignore file in the repo
10. Paste
11. Save

(I only recently realized that I could use dotnet new console -n MyNewProject to collapse steps 1-3)

(And yeah, I could save time with the gitignore stuff, but I am a lazy engineer and want tools to do things for me 😃)

Whereas, when I play with rust and use cargo, my workflow is this:

1. cargo new MyNewProject

The results are the same, a single project is created in a new directory with a Git repo and an appropriate gitignore file. I think we could simplify the dotnet new experience quite a bit.

I like that the cargo cli has decided to be Git-by-default. I realize that doesn’t work in all environments but I think that the command-line audience very frequently wants a git repository and gitignore file. Cargo also has a --vcs option which allows you to choose git, hg, or none, and a config system that allows you to have a user-level default if you aren’t using git.

This would also have to be conditional on detecting if the newly-expanded template is already in a git repo.

[baronfel]

I don’t think we’d include one automatically - we should lean on the existing .gitignore item template, or allow folks to generate their own.

[warrenbuckley]

After a bit of hunting and for anyone else interested, the problem is with dotnet pack and nuget it excludes files starting with a . so obviously .gitignore and similar files will not be part of a dotnet new project template.

To fix this I found it by digging around and seeing this mentioned in this comment https://github.com/fable-compiler/fable-templates/issues/44#issuecomment-912616778

Along with finding it here as well https://github.com/dotnet/templating/issues/2350#issuecomment-610431461

You can see there is an option/flag for dotnet pack -NoDefaultExcludes https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/cli-reference/cli-ref-pack#options

Also it could be set in a csproj file inside a propertygroup element

<NoDefaultExcludes>true</NoDefaultExcludes>

So if anyone else stumbles across this issue hopefully you now have a solution to get a .gitignore file to show up