Looking again at Table 1.1, we see that the rails command creates a default .gitignore file in the application root directory, as shown in Listing 1.6

Listing 1.6 causes Git to ignore files such as log files, Rails temporary (tmp) files, and SQLite databases. (For example, to ignore log files, which live in the log/ directory, we use log/*.log to ignore all files that end in .log.) Most of these ignored files change frequently and automatically, so including them under version control is inconvenient; moreover, when collaborating with others they can cause frustrating and irrelevant conflicts.

The .gitignore file in Listing 1.6 is probably sufficient for this tutorial, but depending on your system you may find Listing 1.7 more convenient. This augmented .gitignore arranges to ignore Rails documentation files, Vim and Emacs swap files, and (for OS X users) the weird .DS_Store directories created by the Mac Finder application. If you want to use this broader set of ignored files, open up .gitignore in your favorite text editor and fill it with the contents of Listing 1.7.