Rails project works well with Git. A .gitignore file can be found in a freshly created Rails project. It would be good to setup the local Git repository before you start the development.

1. First, install Git

• apt-get install git-core

 

2. Setup your Git user account.

• git config –global user.name “Your Name”
• git config –global user.email youremail@example.com

 

3. Also setup the default text editor for Git.

• git config –global core.editor “vi”

 

4. Go to your Rails project root directory and add the following ignore paths in the .gitignore file.

# Default ignore paths
.bundle
db/*.sqlite3
log/*.log
tmp/**/*

# Newly added
*.log
tmp/*
doc/api
doc/app
*.swp
*~
.DS_Store

 

5. Initialize the local Git repository.

• git init

 

6. Go to the Rails project root folder and add all files to the local Git repository.

• git add .

 

7. Compare the working tree with the repository. There will be many new files which we just added.

• git status

 

8. Commit all the newly added files.

• git commit -m “First commit =)”

 

9. Check the status again, there should be nothing to commit. You can also check the commit log by the git log command.

 

Done =)

Reference: Ruby on Rails Tutorial – 1.3 Version control with Git