Does NPM ignore files listed in .gitignore?
If a project has both an .npmignore
and .gitignore
file, npm will only use the .npmignore
file.
From the documentation:
Use a
.npmignore
file to keep stuff out of your package. If there's no.npmignore
file, but there is a.gitignore
file, then npm will ignore the stuff matched by the.gitignore
file. If you want to include something that is excluded by your.gitignore
file, you can create an empty.npmignore
file to override it.
In simpler terms, npm prefers the .npmignore
file if it is there, but will fall back to the .gitignore
file.
In many cases, both Git and npm can ignore the same files, so it makes sense to just use a .gitignore
file on its own. If there's ever a discrepancy (i.e. npm and Git need to ignore different files), then you need to maintain separate .gitignore
and .npmignore
files.
More information on what to put in .npmignore
files: Should I .npmignore my tests?
For anyone reading this trying to ignore a file/dir from git but wish to include it in npm publish and have tried using an empty .npmignore
file with no luck. This works.
In your .gitignore
file, add the file/dir you wish to exclude **/build
for example and in your .npmignore
file make sure you specify the same file/dir but with the !
prefix so for the build example you would include !**/build