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Customizing how changed files appear on GitHub

To keep certain files from displaying in diffs by default, or counting toward the repository language, you can mark them with the linguist-generated attribute in a .gitattributes file.

Use a .gitattributes file to mark files that match a given "pattern" with the specified attributes. A .gitattributes file uses the same rules for matching as .gitignore files. For more information, see PATTERN FORMAT in the Git documentation.

  1. Unless the .gitattributes file already exists, create a .gitattributes file in the root of the repository.

  2. Use the linguist-generated attribute to mark or unmark paths that you would like to be ignored for the repository's language statistics and hidden by default in diffs.

    For example, to mark search/index.json as a generated file, add this line to .gitattributes:

    search/index.json linguist-generated=true

Further reading