If you develop a custom Drupal module and use git to keep track off versions you probably don’t want to include the git files when ‘tarring’ the module.

Normally I would use:

tar czfv modulename.tar.gz modulename/

This creates a gzipped tar file of the module folder and it’s content. Which is great!

But if we use git to keep track of different versions of the module, it will create a bunch of hidden files within the module’s folder.