Storing files in .git

When working on projects I often want to keep some private files around: “TODO” notes, work-in-progress commit messages, various reference files, etc.

For a long time I stored everything in $HOME, which was typically even more cluttered than my actual home. My $HOME/TODO was just a mess of random notes about random stuff.

At some point I realized you can just store stuff in the .git directory.

I typically have a .git/todo which contains carious “oh I thought of this thing, lemme quickly write that down”-kind of notes. A lot of that doesn’t need to be in an issue tracker; half the time it’s just something I need to check to be sure, or something that doesn’t pan out.

I write commit messages in .git/draft, and then git commit -eF .git/draft to use it.

For my bot detection library I have a long list of User-Agent headers, IP addresses (and reverse lookups/internet registry data) to detect patterns. It’s clearly part of the project, but won’t be readily usable for anyone else and doesn’t really need to be in git itself.

I figured this was a small handy tip worth sharing ;-)