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🕹ī¸ Managing File Attributes in Git Repository

🙆 Problem

During the development of a large-scale project involving multiple developers across various platforms, we encountered a recurring issue. Developers were reporting an error when attempting to commit their code.

Error

git commit get fatal error "fatal: CRLF would be replaced by LF in..."

💁 Solution

The immediate solution was to instruct each developer to add the following configuration to their git config: 

'git config --global core.autocrlf false'.

However, we sought a more proactive approach to prevent such an error from arising in the first place.

Our research led us to the use of .gitattributes, which we decided to incorporate into our template.

The .gitattributes file is a configuration file that allows you to specify attributes and behaviors for certain files in your repository. Define the line-ending style, binary or text attributes, and more.

Part of the configuration we implemented is as follows:

# Normalize line endings to LF on check-in and prevent conversion to CRLF when checked out.
# This is necessary to prevent newline related issues, 
#  such as those that might occur after running the build script.

.*      text eol=lf
*.css   text eol=lf
*.html  text eol=lf
*.js    text eol=lf
*.json  text eol=lf
*.scss  text eol=lf
*.md    text eol=lf
*.rs    text eol=lf
*.sh    text eol=lf
*.toml  text eol=lf
*.txt   text eol=lf
*.xml   text eol=lf
*.yaml  text eol=lf
*.yml   text eol=lf
*.py    text eol=lf

This configuration ensures that for the specified file types:

  • 🔄 Line endings are normalized to LF upon check-in.
  • đŸšĢ Conversion to CRLF is prevented when they are checked out.

This helps to prevent newline related issues, such as those that might occur after running the build script.

Reference: