releasing your work

Hoping someone can help,

I have a repository for a web application. It has lots of testing files 
and also others from caching and dynamic content generation (they are 
gitignored).

How do I make a "release" a copy (not a clone) of the repository that 
contains only tracked files without .gitignore files? I am using git 
archive but the resulting zip file still contains .gitignore files.

Cheers,
Lucas.

* Lucas Sandery [off-list ref] [09-04-16 06:53]:

How do I make a "release" a copy (not a clone) of the repository that contains 
only tracked files without .gitignore files? I am using git archive but the 
resulting zip file still contains .gitignore files.

Have a look at the git-archive man page. You can exclude such files by
adding the export-ignore attribute to gitattributes.

Lars Noschinski wrote:

* Lucas Sandery [09-04-16 06:53]:
  

quoted

How do I make a "release" a copy (not a clone) of the repository that contains 
only tracked files without .gitignore files? I am using git archive but the 
resulting zip file still contains .gitignore files.
    

Have a look at the git-archive man page. You can exclude such files by
adding the export-ignore attribute to gitattributes.
  

Thanks Lars,

For anyone else out there with the same problem...

I made a .gitattributes file and it contains only 2 lines:
.gitignore export-ignore
.gitattributes export-ignore

I make my release with:
git archive --format=zip -9 master > ../release.zip
(after right-clicking on my repos root folder and selecting "git bash", 
i'm on a windoze machine at work)
the "../" puts the archive next to the repository folder not in it
e.g. for
c:\path\to\repos\
i get
c:\path\to\release.zip