Mark Auto-Generated Files with linguist-generated

Linguist-Generated Attribute

Auto-generated files — compiled protobuf code, GraphQL types, ORM migrations, minified bundles — are committed to the repository but shouldn't clutter pull request reviews or skew language statistics. The linguist-generated attribute addresses both concerns.

The Attribute

# Build output
dist/**             linguist-generated
build/**            linguist-generated
out/**              linguist-generated

# Generated types
*.generated.ts      linguist-generated
*.generated.go      linguist-generated
*.pb.go             linguist-generated
*.pb.ts             linguist-generated
*_generated.py      linguist-generated

# GraphQL codegen
src/__generated__/** linguist-generated
*.graphql.ts         linguist-generated

# ORM generated
prisma/generated/**  linguist-generated
*.dbml.go            linguist-generated

# Minified
*.min.js             linguist-generated
*.min.css            linguist-generated
*.bundle.js          linguist-generated

Effects on GitHub

Feature	Default	With linguist-generated
Language statistics	Counted	Excluded
PR diff view	Expanded	Collapsed with "generated" label
Code search	Indexed	Excluded from search results
Code review	Reviewable	Hidden by default

linguist-generated vs -diff

These are complementary attributes with different scopes:

Attribute	Scope	Effect
linguist-generated	GitHub web UI	Collapses in PRs, excludes from stats
-diff	Git CLI	Suppresses git diff output

For the best experience, combine both:

*.pb.go text -diff linguist-generated

Protobuf / gRPC Example

A common pattern in Go and TypeScript projects is committing generated protobuf code:

# Generated protobuf (Go)
*.pb.go      text -diff linguist-generated
*_grpc.pb.go text -diff linguist-generated

# Generated protobuf (TypeScript)
*.pb.ts      text -diff linguist-generated
*_grpc_pb.ts text -diff linguist-generated

This keeps the generated code in version control (for reproducible builds) while hiding it from reviews and statistics.