What should be committed?

[SimplicityGuy]

I see many files in the graphify-out directory, specifically in cache. What should be checked into the repo? All but cache?

graphify-out
├── cache
│   ├── 00a069217d057e9a0c80132ab64a010460e67ed7d51340aadcf94ea00109d3f8.json
│   ├── ...
│   └── feb056d74325af7bb5946dfcd4cabdabaa21503c69a563319570042ce10dae4c.json
├── cost.json
├── GRAPH_REPORT.md
├── graph.html
├── graph.json
└── manifest.json

[Khanz9664]

I dug through the README and the team workflow section, and it looks like graphify-out/ is meant to be committed — but not wholesale.

From what I can tell:

• The core, shareable artifacts are graph.json, graph.html, and GRAPH_REPORT.md — these are the “map” that other teammates (and assistants) rely on, so committing them makes sense.
• manifest.json is explicitly described as mtime-based and invalid after clone, so it shouldn’t be in the repo.
• cost.json is just local token accounting, so also not useful to share.
• cache/ is more of a tradeoff: it’s deterministic and can speed up incremental runs across the team, but it can also get large quickly. The README hints it’s optional, so I’d lean toward ignoring it unless the team specifically wants shared caching.

So practically, I’d treat it as:

• commit → graph outputs (source-of-truth artifacts)
• ignore → manifest.json, cost.json
• optional → cache/ depending on repo size vs rebuild speed

Might be worth making this a bit more explicit in the README — especially around cache/, since that’s the main ambiguity.

[nerdCopter]

maybe on-subject, can graphify honor .gitignore by default, or is there an import-syntax to add it into .graphifyignore?

edit: prefer #import .gitignore syntax akin to syncthing

[safishamsi]

Great summary @Khanz9664 — that's exactly the intended pattern. Add this to your .gitignore:

graphify-out/cache/
graphify-out/manifest.json
graphify-out/cost.json

Commit graph.json, graph.html, and GRAPH_REPORT.md — these are the shared knowledge artifacts your team and AI assistants query against. Cache is optional — sharing it speeds up incremental runs for teammates but can get large fast.

On @nerdCopter's question — graphify doesn't honor .gitignore natively yet, but .graphifyignore uses the same syntax (including ! negation patterns added in v0.6.2), so a quick cp .gitignore .graphifyignore gets you there. Worth noting that most common .gitignore entries like node_modules/, dist/, .venv/ are already hardcoded in graphify's skip list, so you'd mainly need to copy project-specific patterns.

[Khanz9664]

Thanks for the confirmation, @safishamsi! Glad the summary was helpful. I agree, explicitly documenting the cache usage in the README would make things clearer for everyone.