It&#x27;s kind of surprising to read about the same experience and even reaching exactly the same conclusions.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;ve recently experimented with checking the build directory in only in production&#x2F;staging branches to avoid constant merge conflicts and the repository bloat. My approach is to have those build-excluding lines in .gitignore file present in development branches and to comment them out in production&#x2F;staging branches. So far it works well, but it&#x27;s sometimes quite confusing to other people on the team.