What are the differences between gitignore and gitkeep

Question

What are the differences between  gitignore and  gitkeep  Are they the same thing with a different name  or do they both serve a different function   I don t seem to be able to find much documentation on  gitkeep

User · Answer

gitignore   is a text file comprising a list of files in your directory that git will ignore or not add update in the repository    gitkeep   Since Git removes or doesn t add empty directories to a repository    gitkeep is sort of a hack  I don t think it s officially named as a part of Git  to keep empty directories in the repository   Just do a touch  path to emptydirectory  gitkeep to add the file  and Git will now be able to maintain this directory in the repository

User · Answer

gitkeep is just a placeholder  A dummy file  so Git will not forget about the directory  since Git tracks only files     If you want an empty directory and make sure it stays  clean  for Git  create a  gitignore containing the following lines within      gitignore sample                        Ignore all files in this dir             except for this one    gitignore   If you desire to have only one type of files being visible to Git  here is an example how to filter everything out  except  gitignore and all  txt files      gitignore to keep just  txt files                                        Filter everything             except the  gitignore      gitignore        and all text files     txt        indicates comments

User · Answer

Many people prefer to use just  keep since the convention has nothing to do with git

User · Answer

This is not an answer to the original question  quot What are the differences between  gitignore and  gitkeep  quot  but posting here to help people to keep track of empty dir in a simple fashion  To track empty directory and knowling that  gitkeep is not official part of git   just add a empty  with no content   gitignore file in it  So for e g  if you have  project content posts and sometimes posts directory might be empty then create empty file  project content posts  gitignore with no content to track that directory and its future files in git

User · Answer

gitkeep isn   t documented  because it   s not a feature of Git   Git cannot add a completely empty directory  People who want to track empty directories in Git have created the convention of putting files called  gitkeep in these directories  The file could be called anything  Git assigns no special significance to this name   There is a competing convention of adding a  gitignore file to the empty directories to get them tracked  but some people see this as confusing since the goal is to keep the empty directories  not ignore them   gitignore is also used to list files that should be ignored by Git when looking for untracked files

[git] What are the differences between .gitignore and .gitkeep?

Examples related to git

Examples related to gitignore