TypeScript .gitignore template

The compiler writes JavaScript, declaration files and source maps next to or beside your TypeScript sources. Everything the compiler emits is reproducible from the sources plus the compiler configuration, so it belongs outside version control. dist and build are the two output directory names the template assumes, matched at any depth because neither rule is anchored.

The two tsbuildinfo rules cover incremental compilation state. That file records the fingerprint of every input from the previous run so the next build can skip unchanged files. It refers to absolute paths on the machine that produced it, which makes a committed one useless at best and a cause of confusing stale builds at worst.

The *.d.ts rule is the one to look at carefully. It ignores every declaration file in the repository, not only generated ones. A project with a hand written types/global.d.ts, an ambient module declaration, or a framework generated file it deliberately tracks will find those files silently untracked. The two negation lines only bring back the .d.cts and .d.mts variants, which is unlikely to be what you needed.

The usual fix is to keep the rule but anchor it to the output directory, or to drop it entirely and rely on dist and build. Since the compiler already writes declarations into the output folder, ignoring that folder covers the generated case without touching anything you wrote by hand.

*.js.map matches source maps in the working tree. Whether you want those published alongside a release is a separate decision from whether they belong in the repository, and this rule only speaks to the second question. Most projects generate them during the build and upload them to an error tracking service instead, which keeps stack traces readable without putting the files in git.