I created a new Github repository today for a Node/Express project at work. After pushing the project code I went to Github and saw that the language for the project was listed as CSS. To be fair to Github, I did style my app with CSS. But as it’s a Node app, I expected to see the JavaScript tag instead.
It turned out the third-party image gallery library I was using had much larger files than anything I was writing. Github’s Linguist library picked up on the larger files and used those to extrapolate CSS as the dominant technology in the app. I still don’t entirely understand why, since the library’s JavaScript files were three times the size of its CSS files.
Now I needed a way to change what the language tag said. Unfortunately, Github doesn’t give you a good way to do this. The Linguist library does give you options to ignore files from third parties though. Here’s how you do it:
- Create a .gitattributes file at the root of your local repository.
- Inside the .gitattributes file, type a path to the containing folder holding your third-party code. At the end of the path type “/*”.
- After the path type “linguist-vendored”. Here is the example from the Linguist troubleshooting section:
special-vendored-path/* linguist-vendoredSave your file, commit it and push it to your remote Github repository.
This takes the third-party code out of consideration for the Linguist algorithm. Once you refresh your Github page the language tag should be different. If the language still doesn’t match what you think it should, try adding the “linguist-vendored” tag to other folders to reduce the types of files Linguist searches.