Question

With south in Django we have something like:

/app
  /migrations
    .. migration files.

Since migration files represent historical structure rather than what’s currently in there I would prefer to not search through them each time. Is there some way I can exclude them by default when running git grep?

Answer 1

This is a bad hack, but it might work for you: create app/migrations/.gitattributes with the following content

* binary

to mark all migrations as binary files and then use git grep -I to skip binary files.

If you also want to ignore migrations in diffs you can do so by changing the content of .gitattributes to

* binary -diff

There is discussion about adding attributes respected by grep, so there might be a proper solution one day.