Is there a way to ignore all files of a type in a directory?

** is apparently meaningless to git, so this doesn't work:

/public/static/**/*.js

The idea is to match arbitrary nested folders.

It would appear that the ** syntax is supported by git as of version 1.8.2.1 according to the documentation.

Two consecutive asterisks ("**") in patterns matched against full pathname may have special meaning:

• A leading "**" followed by a slash means match in all directories. For example, "**/foo" matches file or directory "foo" anywhere, the same as pattern "foo". "**/foo/bar" matches file or directory "bar" anywhere that is directly under directory "foo".

• A trailing "/**" matches everything inside. For example, "abc/**" matches all files inside directory "abc", relative to the location of the .gitignore file, with infinite depth.

• A slash followed by two consecutive asterisks then a slash matches zero or more directories. For example, "a/**/b" matches "a/b", "a/x/b", "a/x/y/b" and so on.

• Other consecutive asterisks are considered invalid.