git-ignore

git-ignore is a small Rust CLI that fetches, lists, and patches .gitignore templates — the usual "make me a .gitignore for Node, Rust, …" tool, plus managed blocks inside your existing file. It is also a personal technical study of what a CLI looks like when you build it around gix (gitoxide) and redb instead of shelling out to git or walking thousands of files on disk.

Warning

This is a pet project used to learn and experiment with optimizations. It is not meant for production use or anything mission critical, use it at your own risk.

How it works

Template registry — pull templates from several sources at once. The standard default git-ignore or your own personal template repository. It scans for *.gitignore files.
Embedded database — one redb file stores template contents keyed by their lowercase namespace/name, alongside per-template upstream OIDs, so update only downloads what actually changed since the last run.
Marker-based patching — I use git-ignore-start / git-ignore-end blocks for the marks inside your .gitignore thus other lines are stay untouched.

What I measured

Syscall counts via strace -c on a static x86_64-unknown-linux-musl profiling build, against the default upstream (github/gitignore):

Task	Command	Syscalls	Notes
List everything	`git-ignore list`	39	zero-copy `rkyv` memory map (down from 96)
Patch a file	`git-ignore patch Node`	173	parses and merges managed template blocks
System & DB info	`git-ignore info`	304	sources, git HEAD, table counts, SHA256 checks
Fresh upstream sync	`git-ignore update -f`	3,663	full git fetch, tree diffing, paged redb storage

Note	A simple "hello world" in some languages can burn over 300 syscalls just to run

Try it

Requires Rust (nightly recommended for fully static builds) and just for the build recipes:

cargo build --release

git-ignore

How it works

What I measured

Try it

Links