What is the purpose of the .gitignore file in the process of working with the Git version control system?

The .gitignore file is used to specify which files or directories Git should ignore and not include in commits. This is useful for excluding temporary files, generated artifacts, development environment settings, and other data that should not be committed to the repository.

For example, in .gitignore, you can add:

# Ignore build files
/build/

# Ignore IDE configuration files
*.iml
.idea/

# Ignore temporary files
*.log

This way, Git will not show these files as modified and will not accidentally include them in commits.