Unity and Git/GitHub not playing nice

[Tamale_Pie]

I know things like this have been asked before. I’ve read through a dozen threads between here and StackOverflow and I haven’t found a solution that works for my situation. Apologies ahead of time for possibly beating a dead horse some more.

The short of it is that my gitignore doesn’t seem to work. I’ll post my current gitignores at the bottom. I have tried many other versions. I added a little bit to the gitignore in the problem project to test.

I’m working through an Udemy course for Unity and C# and I’m trying to use GitHub for version control because I’m playing with things beyond what the course is doing. I have multiple projects in my repo because the course covers different types of games. I have tried placing the gitignore in the root of the repo outside of individual projects, and I have tried placing copies inside of individual projects root folders.

It wasn’t a problem with the first two projects but the third, Coyote McRain, uses asset packs from the Unity Asset Store. As soon as I painted some asset pack textures to my terrain I couldn’t push to GitHub anymore and I started digging to find the problem. No gitignore version that I’ve tried has stopped Library or other folders/files from being committed.

I have made sure that Asset Serialization Mode is Force Text and Version Control is Visible Meta Files in Unity. I tried creating a new repo to start fresh and just copy pasta the individual project folders over. Still doesn’t work. I’m completely lost here.

Just in case it helps I’ll put my repo links.
Original: GitHub - RustyDeGarmo/Udemy-Csharp-Unity-Game-Development: Udemy course for learning game development with C# and Unity
Test: https://github.com/RustyDeGarmo/UnityTest

gitignore used in most places:

This .gitignore file should be placed at the root of your Unity project directory

Get latest from gitignore/Unity.gitignore at main · github/gitignore · GitHub

**/[Ll]ibrary/
**/

emp/
**/[Oo]bj/
**/[Bb]uild/
**/[Bb]uilds/
**/[Ll]ogs/
**/[Uu]ser[Ss]ettings/

# MemoryCaptures can get excessive in size.
# They also could contain extremely sensitive data
**/[Mm]emoryCaptures/

# Recordings can get excessive in size
**/[Rr]ecordings/

# Uncomment this line if you wish to ignore the asset store tools plugin
# /[Aa]ssets/AssetStoreTools*

# Autogenerated Jetbrains Rider plugin
**/[Aa]ssets/Plugins/Editor/JetBrains*

# Visual Studio cache directory
.vs/

# Gradle cache directory
.gradle/

# Autogenerated VS/MD/Consulo solution and project files
**/ExportedObj/
.consulo/
*.csproj
*.unityproj
*.sln
*.suo
*.tmp
*.user
*.userprefs
*.pidb
*.booproj
*.svd
*.pdb
*.mdb
*.opendb
*.VC.db

# Unity3D generated meta files
*.pidb.meta
*.pdb.meta
*.mdb.meta

# Unity3D generated file on crash reports
sysinfo.txt

# Builds
*.apk
*.aab
*.unitypackage
*.app

# Crashlytics generated file
crashlytics-build.properties

# Packed Addressables
**/[Aa]ssets/[Aa]ddressable[Aa]ssets[Dd]ata/*/*.bin*

# Temporary auto-generated Android Assets
**/[Aa]ssets/[Ss]treamingAssets/aa.meta
**/[Aa]ssets/[Ss]treamingAssets/aa/*

gitignore used in Starship Coyote project root is basically the same but I added the following to the bottom:

/[Ll]ibrary/
/[Tt]emp/
/[Oo]bj/
/[Bb]uild/
/[Bb]uilds/
/[Ll]ogs/
/[Uu]ser[Ss]ettings/

[CodeSmile]

The gitignore filename must be .gitignore but the one in the repo is named .gitignore.txt

[Tamale_Pie]

@CodeSmile

The gitignore filename must be .gitignore but the one in the repo is named .gitignore.txt

Thank you! This was a hard way to learn this lesson but I probably won’t forget that again so it’s good.

[Kurt-Dekker]

Sounds like you’re good now but just for completeness sake, here’s my notes.

PROPERLY CONFIGURING AND USING ENTERPRISE SOURCE CONTROL

I’m sorry you’ve had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Prefab links keep getting dumped on Git pull

There really isn’t any fix because git works perfectly with Unity when configured properly. Best practices involve saving your work and closing Unity before using git. But if you understand how Unity does and does not flush changes to disk (or at least ALWAYS do a save-project), you can get away with leaving Unity open. The only thing linking EVERYTHING together in Unity is the GUID assigned to a script or asset. Name is irrelevant. Only the GUID connects it. This GUID is in the meta file. I…

I usually make a separate repository for each game, but I have some repositories with a bunch of smaller test games.

Here is how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

2 steps backwards

Yeah, what Praetor said is it… Debug.Log is your friend, and also since this is animation related, you can open up the Animator window when you expect the animations to go, and actually visually see where the state machine is, see which state it thinks it is in. You can combine this with Debug.Log() output at the locations where you set the animations to be what you think they should be, and that should lead you to some intel. I highly recommend setting up git source control. It really plays ni…

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

When to make a separate object or class/script? Help me think like a programmer! (Example in text.)

This is a reasonable initial approach. The problem is you have listed the parts, but you haven’t really listed how they interact, and even if you did, it’s still sorta up to you how to organize it. Only YOU will know how to organize it, and the only way you can tell is to do the work. I recommend this: first, develop ALWAYS with source control (such as git), and every time you get even the slightest thing working, commit those changes with good commit messages. Then move to the next thing, c…

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Your techniques to share code between projects?

I have found that bundling your own code into DLLs only serves to slow down your workflow. I base this on several years of experience dealing with other teams well-intentioned packaging mishaps. With games, it is almost always useful to reach into library code, make a temporary tweak to isolate a problem, and then revert it. With DLLs this is impossible, making workflow harder and more brittle. I prefer to share source code at the C# level. That way I can reach into libraries trivially and inje…

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

Removing IL2CPP_cache from Project

Not sure what you are “auto generating” with… I usually start from one of my other projects, or a gitignore example online, and reason about all the parts inside it, and start from there. Like any other configuration change, after you make it, pay attention for a while to make sure it is what you want. You can always clone the repo somewhere else to verify that the correct files are being tracked. Doing so to a brand-new computer is the acid test to make sure you can still build the project. …

Generally the ONLY folders you should ever source control are:

Assets/
ProjectSettings/
Packages/

NEVER source control Library/ or Temp/ or Logs/
NEVER source control anything from Visual Studio (.vs, .csproj, none of that noise)

Setting git up with Unity (includes above .gitignore concepts):

How to Git with Unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It’s simply ridiculous not to back up.

If you plan on joining the software industry, you will be required and expected to know how to use source control.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards