In this folder we keep configuration files. You may want to create environment specific versions of slovo.conf named after the environment e.g. slovo.development.conf or slovo.production.conf. The environment specific files will be detected and used. These files may be changed locally for experimenting but local changes usualy do not have to go upstream. To ignore such files but keep them versioned one have to run the command "git update-index". Here is an example with slovo.conf. git update-index --assume-unchanged etc/slovo.development.conf To make git track the file again, when you have a change that you want to push upstream, simply run: git update-index --no-assume-unchanged etc/slovo.development.conf. See also: https://help.github.com/articles/ignoring-files#ignoring-versioned-files