Unity .gitignore and Git for Game Development

Commit your .meta files

This is the mistake that costs the most time, because the damage shows up later and looks random. Every asset in Unity has a companion .meta file holding its GUID, and every reference in your scenes, prefabs and materials points at that GUID rather than at a file path. Ignore .meta files and each developer generates different GUIDs for the same asset, so references that work on your machine resolve to nothing on everyone else's. Missing script references and unassigned materials are the usual symptoms.

Set Asset Serialization to Force Text in the same panel. Scenes and prefabs are then written as YAML rather than binary, which is what makes them diffable and merge-able at all.

The template above ignores three .meta patterns (*.pidb.meta, *.pdb.meta, *.mdb.meta). Those are the exception, not the rule: the assets they describe are themselves ignored, so their .meta files describe nothing.

Library is already committed. Now what?

.gitignore only prevents untracked files from being added. It has no effect on files Git already tracks, which is why adding Library to .gitignore appears to do nothing on an existing repository. Stop tracking it explicitly:

# Stop tracking, but keep the folder on disk
git rm -r --cached Library
git rm -r --cached Temp obj Build Builds Logs UserSettings

git commit -m "Stop tracking Unity generated folders"
git push

The --cached flag is what keeps your local files. Without it you delete the folders from disk as well, which is recoverable for Library, since Unity rebuilds it, but not for anything you meant to keep. Teammates receive the deletion on their next pull and their local Library rebuilds automatically on the next Editor launch.

Check what is actually tracked before and after:

# List tracked files that your .gitignore now excludes
git ls-files --cached --ignored --exclude-standard

# Confirm a specific path is ignored, and by which rule
git check-ignore -v Library/somefile

Removing the folders from the current commit does not shrink the repository, because the history still contains every version. If the clone size is the problem you need to rewrite history with git filter-repo, which changes every commit hash and requires all collaborators to re-clone. Worth it on a repository that has grown to gigabytes; not worth it otherwise.

What must stay in the repository

Excluding too much is as damaging as excluding too little, and harder to notice. These are not optional:

• Assets/ and every .meta file inside it. Your entire project.
• ProjectSettings/. Input axes, physics layers, quality levels, player settings, tags. The project behaves differently without it, and the differences are subtle enough to waste a day.
• Packages/manifest.json and Packages/packages-lock.json. These pin your package versions. Without the lock file, teammates can silently resolve different versions.

Note that UserSettings/ is ignored while ProjectSettings/ is committed. The names are similar and the consequences of confusing them are not.