Problem description

Users and developers use different editors and tool to edit, backup and process code, documentation and assets. It is not feasible to catch them all in a project's .dockerignore. Instead, a user should be able to blacklist the file of their own toolchain.

Proposed solution

Add a global .dockerignore, e.g. at $HOME/config/docker/dockerignore, which gets combined with the project's .dockerignore.

References

Docker is not the only tool with this problem. The problem is well known in the VCS world. GIT for example accepts the global core.excludesfile option which points to a global .gitignore. This file is combined with the projects .gitignore to blacklist more files.

Open questions

• Where should the config file be located on Windows?
• Should the global ignore file virtually appended or prepended to the local file? Does this make a huge different? If so, what are the implications and the pros and cons of the different strategies?