How to tell claude CLI agent to ignore directories (i.e. is there a ".claudeignore"?)

[dannguyen]

Was playing around with the CLI tool and noticed that for a relatively small project (<5000 tokens), Claude was regularly making queries using 120,000+ input tokens. I thought it would ignore ancillary code and cache folders (e.g. node_modules/) but I'm not so sure now; asking it if it ignores node_modules/ gives me inconsistent answers

Is there a way to specify that certain folders in a project codebase be ignored?

[andrewchilds]

Another use case here is not wanting Claude to read or index (gitignored) secret files that contain things like API tokens.

Prior art/discussion: continuedev/continue#4053, Aider-AI/aider#282

[bcherny]

We added ignorePatterns in v0.2.18. Restart to get the update, and learn more in the docs: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-code/overview#project-configuration.

Keep the feedback coming!

[tobbbe]

@bcherny ignorePatterns doesnt seem to be valid config in 0.2.19:

Also, will I save alot of tokens by excluding node_modules? I ran summarize this project (without ignorePatterns) from the docs on my nextjs project with 89 files (no big ones) and that used 180k tokens. Is that normal?

I understand that by excluding node_modules claude might not be as smart. But for simpler tasks, saving tokens might be worth it?

Im also wondering if I should ignore .git/ and .next/ (the output for builds/dev) folders?

[kevinjyee]

For anyone else having this problem in version >0.2.19

The docs are out of date, it should now be claude config set ignorePatterns node_modules

Posting here even though this issue is closed since it was the top indexed google search result.

[YayC]

The docs are out of date, it should now be claude config set ignorePatterns node_modules

hmm, how do you add multiple ignorePatterns? this feels like a bug and it should be claude config add ignorePatterns as shown in the docs.

@bcherny sorry for the ping but I think this issue should be reopened until the tool or docs are updated

[drvitek]

Per a @bcherny response elsewhere (#166 (comment)), Claude Code now "ignore[s] anything in your .gitignore, but tools can still access these."

[clayallsopp]

These docs mention .claudeignore - https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-code/troubleshooting#high-cpu-or-memory-usage

Is that not accurate/used by Claude Code?