From Toolman Tim’s blog entry Setting up a new Rails app with Git (with a few changes, and summarized for personal reference).

$ git init
$ mate .gitignore

Add in .gitignore:

log/*.log
tmp/**/*
.DS_Store
doc/api
doc/app
config/database.yml
db/schema.rb

Back to the command line:

$ cp config/database.yml config/database.yml.example
$ touch log/.gitignore
$ touch tmp/.gitignore
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial commit"

Additional Notes:

• Git Tutorial Intro
• Git User’s Manual
• Everyday GIT with 20 Commands or so
• SourceMage’s Git Guide
• To manage edge rails, use Giston or just delete and re-export (taken from the comments of the blog entry).
• Touch empty dirs (thanks to Nick Poulden’s comment):

  find . \( -type d -empty \) -and \( -not -regex ./\.git.* \) -exec touch {}/.gitignore \;