Remove .DS_Store files

DS_Store file is acronym of Desktop Service Store. In Xcode app, we can have more than one .DS_Store files.

How to remove DS_Store files via .gitignore

We can use gitignore file for handling .DS_Store files but note that we cannot delete .DS_Store files via a .gitignore file, but we can prevent them from being tracked by Git.

Steps to create .gitignore

Open Terminal and follow steps

Step1: Navigate to location for Git repo/project.

Step2: Create a .gitignore file via following command on terminal

touch .gitignore 

The .gitignore file tells Git which files to ignore. To stop .DS_Store files from being tracked, add the following line to your project's .gitignore file

.DS_Store

This ensures that any .DS_Store files in your project won't be included in future commits.

Remove Tracked .DS_Store Files

If .DS_Store files are already tracked in your repository, you need to remove them. Run the following commands:

Step 1: Find and remove .DS_Store files

find . -name ".DS_Store" -print -delete

Step 2: Update Git’s index:

git rm --cached .DS_Store

Step 3: Commit the changes:

git commit -m "Remove .DS_Store files"

Now we can push the changes on Git repo.

And DONE for your repo. 🎉

Global Ignore for .DS_Store

Now if we want to ignore.DS_Store files are ignored in all repositories on your machine, we can do following steps

Step1 : Create or edit the global .gitignore file:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Step 2: Add .DS_Store to the global .gitignore

echo ".DS_Store" >> ~/.gitignore_global

Step 3: Verify the global setting

git config --get core.excludesfile

And done 🎉🎉 Now .DS_Store files will be ignored in all repositories.

Bonus::

Now For macOS, we can prevent Finder from creating .DS_Store files on network drives with this terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true

CHEERS 🎉🎉🎉