Last Updated: 2024-04-25

I created a feature of Semicolon&Sons for browsing videos by tags. However when I ran the integration tests on CircleCI, they failed, saying the app/views/tags/show.html.erb file was not present. The weird part was that the file was on my machine.

The issue was that my global gitignore had an entry for ignoring ctag-generated "tags" files.

tags

The way this was expressed had the effect of also ignoring folders named tags - even deeply nested ones. Therefore I needed to modify this gitignore file to allow for folders named tags:

tags
!tags/

Explanation of what this does:

• ignore tags files
• but do not ignore tags/ folders

Lessons

When writing a gitignore file (or any similar "ignore file"), ask yourself whether what you are adding ignores files - or folders - or both. Do the minimum ignoring you need to.

What's more, be especially careful with respect to global ignore files, since their effects are further reaching and you mightn't remember to inspect this file when debugging.