Question: I'm a noob to RoR, so any help/clarification is appreciated.

Is the .gitignore file in Rails universal/global to all of Rails, or does each project/app have its own .gitignore?

Answer: 
A default `.gitignore` is created when you create a new Rails app. That file tells git to ignore the things that are in a default Rails app that should probably be ignored.

If there are other files that should be ignored in your specific app, you can make changes to the `.gitignore`. If you're not using git, you can delete the file entirely.

It's basically there to encourage best practices, but is in no way required to run a Rails app.
There's a .gitignore\_global file in your ~/ directory that every git instance references.
Git is independent of rails.
the .gitignore file is restricted to the initialized repository.