How to git ignore subfolders subdirectories

Question

I have a lot of projects in my  Net solution  I would like to exclude all  quot bin Debug quot  and  quot bin Release quot  folders  and their contents   but still include the  quot bin quot  folder itself and any dll s contained therein   gitignore with  quot bin  quot  ignores  quot Debug quot  and  quot Release quot  folders  but also any dll s contained in the  quot bin quot  folder  bin Debug or bin Release in the  gitignore file does not exclude the directories unless I fully qualify the ignore pattern as Solution Project bin Debug - which I don t want to do as I will need to include this full pattern for each project in my solution  as well as add it for any new projects added  Any suggestions

User · Answer

Seems this page still shows up on the top of Google search after so many years    Modern versions of Git support nesting  gitignore files within a single repo  Just place a  gitignore file in the subdirectory that you want ignored  Use a single asterisk to match everything in that directory  echo  quot   quot   gt   path to bin Debug  gitignore echo  quot   quot   gt   path to bin Release  gitignore  If you ve made previous commits  remember to remove previously tracked files  git rm -rf  path to bin Debug git rm -rf  path to bin Release  You can confirm it by doing git status to show you all the files removed from tracking

User · Answer

The only way I got this to work on my machine was to do it this way     Ignore all directories  and all sub-directories  and it s contents        Now ignore all files in the current directory    This fails to ignore files without a      for example    file txt  works  but    file  doesn t          Only Include these specific directories and subdirectories   wordpress   wordpress     wordpress   wp-content   wordpress   wp-content themes    Notice how you have to explicitly allow content for each level you want to include  So if I have subdirectories 5 deep under themes  I still need to spell that out   This is from  Yarin s comment here  https   stackoverflow com a 5250314 1696153  These were useful topics    How do negated patterns work in  gitignore  How do gitignore exclusion rules actually work    I also tried                 and    wp-content themes     or  wp-content themes       None of that worked for me  either  Lots of trail and error

User · Answer

You can use  gitignore in the top level to ignore all directories in the project with the same name  For example   Debug  Release    This should update immediately so it s visible when you do git status  Ensure that these directories are not already added to git  as that will override the ignores

User · Answer

To exclude content and subdirectories      bin     To just exclude all subdirectories but take the content  add          bin

User · Answer

The question isn t asking about ignoring all subdirectories  but I couldn t find the answer anywhere  so I ll post it

User · Answer

The generic way to ignore all subfolders  while continuing to track the files that are in the  bin directory would be to add the following line to your project s  gitignore file   bin       If you want to ignore only particular named subfolders  you can do   bin Debug   bin Release     nb  if the bin directory is not in the root of your project  alongside the  gitignore file   then instead of eg  bin     you might need path to bin

User · Answer

Besides putting the correct entries in your  gitignore file  if you re trying to ignore something already added to the repo  you have to do git rm -r  path to dir and commit that before you add the dir to your  gitignore file  Otherwise the only thing git will ignore is your ignore directive

User · Answer

For ignoring subfolders but not main folder I could only get this to work in Visual Studio Code by placing a dummy readme txt in the main folder  Only then     checked in the main folder  and no subfolders

User · Answer

To ignore all subdirectories you can simply use         This works as of version 1 8 2 of git

User · Answer

All the above answers are valid  but something that I don t think is mentioned is that once you add a file from that directory into the repo  you can t ignore that directory subdirectory that contains that file  git will ignore that directive     To ignore already added files run    git rm --cached   Otherwise you ll have to remove all files from the repo s target directory first - and then you can ignore that folder

User · Answer

Have you tried wildcards   Solution   bin Debug Solution   bin Release   With version 1 8 2 of git  you can also use the    wildcard to match any level of subdirectories      bin Debug     bin Release

[git] How to git ignore subfolders / subdirectories?

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