Keeping Diffs Clean With .gitattributes

.gitignore decides what enters the repo; .gitattributes decides how Git treats what is in it. One small file at the root, and four annoyances quietly disappear.

Line endings that stop moving#

* text=auto eol=lf

Every text file normalizes to LF in the repo, whatever editor or OS committed it. The “whole file changed” diffs that come from a Windows checkout meeting an LF repo stop happening, and this line costs you nothing on day one of a repo.

Diffs that show what matters#

Lock files are for machines. Hiding their diffs keeps reviews on your code:

composer.lock -diff
package-lock.json -diff

The files still commit, still version, still deploy - they just stop producing thousand-line review noise. On GitHub, mark generated directories so they collapse by default and stay out of the language stats:

public/build/** linguist-generated=true

Hunk headers that name the function#

*.php diff=php

With the PHP diff driver, every hunk header in a diff names the method or function it sits in, not whatever line happened to be nearby. Reviewing git log -p on a large model gets noticeably easier.

Cleaner package downloads#

If any repo is ever installed as a Composer package, export-ignore keeps its development baggage out of other people’s vendor/:

/tests export-ignore
/.github export-ignore
/phpunit.xml export-ignore

End users download the code, not your CI.

None of this is mandatory and none of it changes what runs. It is housekeeping: the diffs get shorter, the reviews get faster, and the repo stops leaking its working files into places they never belonged.