# Git Version Control Resource.Json Files

**URL:** <https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/git-version-control-resource-json-files/111329>\
**Category:** Ignition\
**Tags:** ignition83\
**Created:** [October 9, 2025, 9:31pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/git-version-control-resource-json-files/111329 "2025-10-09T21:31:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jacob\_Dipietro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/82dd89/32.png) [@Jacob\_Dipietro](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/Jacob_Dipietro)\
**Post date:** [October 9, 2025, 9:31pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/git-version-control-resource-json-files/111329/1 "2025-10-09T21:31:42Z")

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So I am working on developing a version control workflow for my company and I had a question I can’t seem to find answers to, at least with my wording.

If my goal is a near complete management of the gateway and projects in Github, is it reasonable to gitignore the resource.json files?

Most of the time the changes seem to be timestamps and such modifying user. I am not sure if that is valuable or if that is just clogging up the commit history.

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**Author:** ![paul-griffith](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/paul-griffith/32/37249_2.png) [@paul-griffith](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/paul-griffith)\
**Post date:** [October 9, 2025, 10:23pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/git-version-control-resource-json-files/111329/2 "2025-10-09T22:23:21Z")

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You **absolutely** must commit the `resource.json` file. Without it restoration is not safe, and some of the attributes within it define critical metadata.

This is unfortunately noisy, mostly because we constantly attempt to recalculate the 'last modification signature' and reapply it to the file. In 8.3 we no longer do this - if the signature is not valid, we just leave the file alone and assume you know what you're doing.

But fundamentally an Ignition resource is **defined by** the presence of a `resource.json` file inside a folder inside a particular folder structure - if you are missing one of those aspects you don't have an Ignition resource anymore.

More info here:

> [@Ignition internal Folder Structure](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/ignition-internal-folder-structure/110717/2):
>
> I thought we had some kind of reference page for this in the manual, but all I found was this, which is not quite the full story: This old post of mine goes into more detail, though is a bit out of date: Basically: projects/ has an ignorable .resources/ folder. All other folders in projects/ will be scanned - if they contain a valid project.json manifest, then they make up an Ignition project. The name of the project will be the literal name of the folder on disk. Below each project direc…