You Can Hide Languages From GitHub's Languages Bar

Today I learned that you can hide languages that show up on the side on GitHub repositories and other hosted Git services like GitLab. You can do this by adding a .gitattributes file to your repository.

For example, I have a bunch of fake PHP files to mess with bots and script kiddies, such as: https://nelson.cloud/wp-login.php. As a result, GitHub was showing that most of my language usage for this repository was “Hack”:

Hack is not representative of what I actually use to build this static site. I wanted to get rid of “Hack” from the languages bar. To do that, I created a .gitattributes file at the root of my repository, then I added this line to exclude PHP files from being counted:

*.php -linguist-detectable

This will exclude all PHP files in this repository from being counted in the languages bar. Committing and pushing this .gitattributes file to my repository results in “Hack” being gone (along with 0.1% of PHP):

You can also only exclude files in certain directories. For example, I could exclude PHP files only in my static/ directory like so:

static/**/*.php -linguist-detectable

You can substitute any path and filetype. All of these examples should work on GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo, and Codeberg as well.

The linguist-detectable part determines whether matching files are counted in the languages bar. Prefixing it with a dash - means matching files are not counted, which is why it has a leading dash in all of the examples here. You can read more about how linguist-detectable works in the official repository: Linguist. Although Linguist is a GitHub project, other hosted Git services chose to support its attributes, which is why all of this works in GitLab and the others.

References

• https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/blob/main/docs/overrides.md