How to Keep Your Git Repo Free of Build Artifacts

If your diffs are full of files nobody hand-edits, generated junk is in version control. Here is how to evict it and keep it out.

How to fix it

1. Start from a known .gitignore

Use the engine's official .gitignore as a base and extend it with your IDE and OS noise files.

2. Untrack what slipped in

Run git rm -r --cached on already-committed generated folders, then commit the removal so they stop being tracked.

3. Verify before pushing

Make a clean build and confirm git status shows nothing new, proving the ignore rules cover every generated path.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.