How can I add an empty directory to a Git repository

Question

How can I add an empty directory  that contains no files  to a Git repository

User · Answer

Why would we need empty versioned folders

First things first:

An empty directory cannot be part of a tree under the Git versioning system.

It simply won't be tracked. But there are scenarios in which "versioning" empty directories can be meaningful, for example:

scaffolding a predefined folder structure, making it available to every user/contributor of the repository; or, as a specialized case of the above, creating a folder for temporary files, such as a cache/ or logs/ directories, where we want to provide the folder but .gitignore its contents
related to the above, some projects won't work without some folders (which is often a hint of a poorly designed project, but it's a frequent real-world scenario and maybe there could be, say, permission problems to be addressed).

Some suggested workarounds

Many users suggest:

Placing a README file or another file with some content in order to make the directory non-empty, or
Creating a .gitignore file with a sort of "reverse logic" (i.e. to include all the files) which, at the end, serves the same purpose of approach #1.

While both solutions surely work I find them inconsistent with a meaningful approach to Git versioning.

Why are you supposed to put bogus files or READMEs that maybe you don't really want in your project?
Why use .gitignore to do a thing (keeping files) that is the very opposite of what it's meant for (excluding files), even though it is possible?

.gitkeep approach

Use an empty file called .gitkeep in order to force the presence of the folder in the versioning system.

Although it may seem not such a big difference:

You use a file that has the single purpose of keeping the folder. You don't put there any info you don't want to put.

For instance, you should use READMEs as, well, READMEs with useful information, not as an excuse to keep the folder.

Separation of concerns is always a good thing, and you can still add a .gitignore to ignore unwanted files.
Naming it .gitkeep makes it very clear and straightforward from the filename itself (and also to other developers, which is good for a shared project and one of the core purposes of a Git repository) that this file is
- A file unrelated to the code (because of the leading dot and the name)
- A file clearly related to Git
- Its purpose (keep) is clearly stated and consistent and semantically opposed in its meaning to ignore

Adoption

I've seen the .gitkeep approach adopted by very important frameworks like Laravel, Angular-CLI.

User · Answer

As mentioned it s not possible to add empty directories  but here is a one liner that adds empty  gitignore files to all directories    ruby -e  require  fileutils    Dir glob   target directory   target directory       each    f  FileUtils touch File join f    gitignore    if File directory  f      I have stuck this in a Rakefile for easy access

User · Answer

You can t   See the Git FAQ      Currently the design of the git index    staging area  only permits files to   be listed  and nobody competent enough   to make the change to allow empty   directories has cared enough about   this situation to remedy it       Directories are added automatically   when adding files inside them  That   is  directories never have to be added   to the repository  and are not tracked   on their own       You can say  git add  lt dir gt   and it   will add files in there       If you really need a directory to   exist in checkouts you should create a   file in it   gitignore works well for   this purpose  you can leave it empty    or fill in the names of files you   expect to show up in the directory

User · Answer

You could always put a README file in the directory with an explanation of why you want this  otherwise empty  directory in the repository

User · Answer

Many have already answered this question  Just adding a PowerShell version here   Find all the empty folders in the directory Add a empty  gitkeep file in there  Get-ChildItem  Path to your Folder  -Recurse -Directory   Where-Object   System IO Directory   GetFileSystemEntries    FullName  Count -eq 0    ForEach-Object   New-Item     FullName    quot   gitkeep quot   -ItemType file

User · Answer

Just add a readme or a  gitignore and then delete it  not from terminal  from the github website  that will give a empty repository

User · Answer

There s no way to get Git to track directories  so the only solution is to add a placeholder file within the directory that you want Git to track   The file can be named and contain anything you want  but most people use an empty file named  gitkeep  although some people prefer the VCS-agnostic  keep    The prefixed   marks it as a hidden file   Another idea would be to add a README file explaining what the directory will be used for

User · Answer

Another way to make a directory stay  almost  empty  in the repository  is to create a  gitignore file inside that directory that contains these four lines     Ignore everything in this directory     Except this file   gitignore   Then you don t have to get the order right the way that you have to do in m104 s solution   This also gives the benefit that files in that directory won t show up as  untracked  when you do a git status   Making  GreenAsJade s comment persistent      I think it s worth noting that this solution does precisely what the question asked for  but is not perhaps what many people looking at this question will have been looking for  This solution guarantees that the directory remains empty  It says  I truly never want files checked in here   As opposed to  I don t have any files to check in here  yet  but I need the directory here  files may be coming later

User · Answer

You can t  This is an intentional design decision by the Git maintainers  Basically  the purpose of a Source Code Management System like Git is managing source code and empty directories aren t source code  Git is also often described as a content tracker  and again  empty directories aren t content  quite the opposite  actually   so they are not tracked

User · Answer

Here is a hack  but it s funny that it works  Git 2 2 1   Similar to what  Teka suggested  but easier to remember    Add a submodule to any repository  git submodule add path to repo  This will add a folder and a file  submodules  Commit a change  Delete  submodules file and commit the change    Now  you have a directory that gets created when commit is checked out  An interesting thing though is that if you look at the content of tree object of this file you ll get      fatal  Not a valid object name   b64338b90b4209263b50244d18278c0999867193   I wouldn t encourage to use it though since it may stop working in the future versions of Git  Which may leave your repository corrupted

User · Answer

As described in other answers  Git is unable to represent empty directories in its staging area   See the Git FAQ   However  if  for your purposes  a directory is empty enough if it contains a  gitignore file only  then you can create  gitignore files in empty directories only via   find   -type d -empty -exec touch     gitignore

User · Answer

Let s say you need an empty directory named tmp      mkdir tmp   touch tmp  gitignore   git add tmp   echo      gt  tmp  gitignore   git commit -m  Empty directory  tmp   In other words  you need to add the  gitignore file to the index before you can tell Git to ignore it  and everything else in the empty directory

User · Answer

To extend Jamie Flournoy s solution to a directory tree  you can put this  gitignore in the top-level directory and touch  keepdir in each subdirectory that git should track  All other files are ignored  This is useful to ensure a consistent structure for build directories      Ignore files but not directories    matches both files and directories   but    matches only directories  Both match at every directory level   at or below this one           Git doesn t track empty directories  so track  keepdir files  which also    tracks the containing directory     keepdir    Keep this file and the explanation of how this works   gitignore  Readme md

User · Answer

Sometimes I have repositories with folders that will only ever contain files considered to be  content    that is  they are not files that I care about being versioned  and therefore should never be committed  With Git s  gitignore file  you can ignore entire directories  But there are times when having the folder in the repo would be beneficial  Here s a excellent solution for accomplishing this need   What I ve done in the past is put a  gitignore file at the root of my repo  and then exclude the folder  like so    app some-folder-to-exclude  another-folder-to-exclude     However  these folders then don t become part of the repo  You could add something like a README file in there  But then you have to tell your application not to worry about processing any README files   If your app depends on the folders being there  though empty   you can simply add a  gitignore file to the folder in question  and use it to accomplish two goals   Tell Git there s a file in the folder  which makes Git add it to the repo  Tell Git to ignore the contents of this folder  minus this file itself  Here is the  gitignore file to put inside your empty directories       gitignore   The first line     tells Git to ignore everything in this directory  The second line tells Git not to ignore the  gitignore file  You can stuff this file into every empty folder you want added to the repository

User · Answer

I ve been facing the issue with empty directories  too  The problem with using placeholder files is that you need to create them  and delete them  if they are not necessary anymore  because later on there were added sub-directories or files  With big source trees managing these placeholder files can be cumbersome and error prone   This is why I decided to write an open source tool which can manage the creation deletion of such placeholder files automatically  It is written for  NET platform and runs under Mono   NET for Linux  and Windows   Just have a look at  http   code google com p markemptydirs

User · Answer

Reading  ofavre s and  stanislav-bashkyrtsev s answers using broken GIT submodule references to create the GIT directories  I m surprised that nobody has suggested yet this simple amendment of the idea to make the whole thing sane and safe   Rather than hacking a fake submodule into GIT  just add an empty real one   Enter  https   gitlab com empty-repo empty git  A GIT repository with exactly one commit   commit e84d7b81f0033399e325b8037ed2b801a5c994e0 Author  Nobody  lt none gt  Date  Thu Jan 1 00 00 00 1970  0000   No message  no committed files   Usage  To add an empty directory to you GIT repo   git submodule add https   gitlab com empty-repo empty git path to dir   To convert all existing empty directories to submodules   find   -type d -empty -delete -exec git submodule add -f https   gitlab com empty-repo empty git           Git will store the latest commit hash when creating the submodule reference  so you don t have to worry about me  or GitLab  using this to inject malicious files  Unfortunately I have not found any way to force which commit ID is used during checkout  so you ll have to manually check that the reference commit ID is e84d7b81f0033399e325b8037ed2b801a5c994e0 using git submodule status after adding the repo   Still not a native solution  but the best we probably can have without somebody getting their hands really  really dirty in the GIT codebase   Appendix  Recreating this commit  You should be able to recreate this exact commit using  in an empty directory      Initialize new GIT repository git init    Set author data  don t set it as part of the  git commit  command or your default data will be stored as    commit author     git config --local user name  Nobody  git config --local user email  none     Set both the commit and the author date to the start of the Unix epoch  this cannot be done using  git commit  directly  export GIT AUTHOR DATE  Thu Jan 1 00 00 00 1970  0000  export GIT COMMITTER DATE  Thu Jan 1 00 00 00 1970  0000     Add root commit git commit --allow-empty --allow-empty-message --no-edit   Creating reproducible GIT commits is surprisingly hard

User · Answer

An easy way to do this is by adding a  gitkeep file to the directory you wish to  currently  keep empty    See this SOF answer for further info - which also explains why some people find the competing convention of adding a  gitignore file  as stated in many answers here  confusing

User · Answer

Create an empty file called  gitkeep in the directory  and add that

User · Answer

This simple solution worked for me  1  Add a  gitignore file to your empty directory         gitignore     ignore all files in the folder    Ignore subdirectories   gitignore include the  gitignore file  2  Then remove your cache  stage your files  commit and push  git rm -r --cached   git add      or git stage   git commit -m  quot  gitignore fix quot  git push

User · Answer

Adding one more option to the fray   Assuming you would like to add a directory to git that  for all purposes related to git  should remain empty and never have it s contents tracked  a  gitignore as suggested numerous times here  will do the trick   The format  as mentioned  is       gitignore   Now  if you want a way to do this at the command line  in one fell swoop  while inside the directory you want to add  you can execute     echo      gt   gitignore  amp  amp  echo    gitignore   gt  gt   gitignore  amp  amp  git add  gitignore   Myself  I have a shell script that I use to do this   Name the script whatever you whish  and either add it somewhere in your include path  or reference it directly      bin bash  dir     if     1           then     dir   1   fi  echo      gt   dir gitignore  amp  amp    echo    gitignore   gt  gt   dir gitignore  amp  amp    git add  dir gitignore   With this  you can either execute it from within the directory you wish to add  or reference the directory as it s first and only parameter     ignore dir   some directory   Another option  in response to a comment by  GreenAsJade   if you want to track an empty folder that MAY contain tracked files in the future  but will be empty for now  you can ommit the   from the  gitignore file  and check that in   Basically  all the file is saying is  do not ignore me   but otherwise  the directory is empty and tracked   Your  gitignore file would look like     gitignore   That s it  check that in  and you have an empty  yet tracked  directory that you can track files in at some later time   The reason I suggest keeping that one line in the file is that it gives the  gitignore purpose  Otherwise  some one down the line may think to remove it   It may help if you place a comment above the line

User · Answer

Git does not track empty directories  See the Git FAQ for more explanation  The suggested workaround is to put a  gitignore file in the empty directory  I do not like that solution  because the  gitignore is  hidden  by Unix convention  Also there is no explanation why the directories are empty   I suggest to put a README file in the empty directory explaining why the directory is empty and why it needs to be tracked in Git  With the README file in place  as far as Git is concerned  the directory is no longer empty   The real question is why do you need the empty directory in git  Usually you have some sort of build script that can create the empty directory before compiling running  If not then make one  That is a far better solution than putting empty directories in git   So you have some reason why you need an empty directory in git  Put that reason in the README file  That way other developers  and future you  know why the empty directory needs to be there  You will also know that you can remove the empty directory when the problem requiring the empty directory has been solved     To list every empty directory use the following command   find -name  git -prune -o -type d -empty -print   To create placeholder READMEs in every empty directory   find -name  git -prune -o -type d -empty -exec sh -c      echo this directory needs to be empty because reasons  gt     README emptydir       To ignore everything in the directory except the README file put the following lines in your  gitignore   path to emptydir    path to emptydir README emptydir path to otheremptydir    path to otheremptydir README emptydir   Alternatively  you could just exclude every README file from being ignored   path to emptydir   path to otheremptydir    README emptydir   To list every README after they are already created   find -name README emptydir

User · Answer

When you add a  gitignore file  if you are going to put any amount of content in it  that you want Git to ignore  you might want to add a single line with just an asterisk   to make sure you don t add the ignored content accidentally

User · Answer

I always build a function to check for my desired folder structure and build it for me within the project  This gets around this problem as the empty folders are held in Git by proxy   function check page custom folder structure          if   is dir TEMPLATEPATH   page-customs            mkdir TEMPLATEPATH   page-customs            if   is dir TEMPLATEPATH   page-customs css            mkdir TEMPLATEPATH   page-customs css        if   is dir TEMPLATEPATH   page-customs js            mkdir TEMPLATEPATH   page-customs js        This is in PHP  but I am sure most languages support the same functionality  and because the creation of the folders is taken care of by the application  the folders will always be there

User · Answer

I like the answers by  Artur79 and  mjs so I ve been using a combination of both and made it a standard for our projects   find   -type d -empty -exec touch     gitkeep      However  only a handful of our developers work on Mac or Linux  A lot work on Windows and I could not find an equivalent simple one-liner to accomplish the same there  Some were lucky enough to have Cygwin installed for other reasons  but prescribing Cygwin just for this seemed overkill   Edit for a better solution  So  since most of our developers already have Ant installed  the first thing I thought of was to put together an Ant build file to accomplish this independently of the platform  This can still be found here  However  I later thought It would be better to make this into a small utility command  so I recreated it using Python and published it to the PyPI here  You can install it by simply running   pip3 install gitkeep2   It will allow you to create and remove  gitkeep files recursively  and it will also allow you to add messages to them for your peers to understand why those directories are important  This last bit is bonus  I thought it would be nice if the  gitkeep files could be self-documenting     gitkeep --help Usage  gitkeep  OPTIONS  PATH    Add a  gitkeep file to a directory in order to push them into a Git repo   even if they re empty     Read more about why this is necessary at  https   git wiki kernel org inde   x php Git FAQ Can I add empty directories 3F  Options    -r  --recursive     Add or remove the  gitkeep files recursively for all                       sub-directories in the specified path    -l  --let-go        Remove the  gitkeep files from the specified path    -e  --empty         Create empty  gitkeep files  This will ignore any                       message provided   -m  --message TEXT  A message to be included in the  gitkeep file  ideally                       used to explain why it s important to push the specified                       directory to source control even if it s empty    -v  --verbose       Print out everything    --help              Show this message and exit    I hope you find it useful

User · Answer

You can save this code as create readme php and run the PHP code from the root directory of your Git project     gt  php create readme php   It will add README files to all directories that are empty so those directories would be then added to the index    lt  php      path   realpath            objects   new RecursiveIteratorIterator new RecursiveDirectoryIterator  path         RecursiveIteratorIterator  SELF FIRST       foreach  objects as  name   gt   object           if   is dir  name   amp  amp    is empty folder  name                 echo   name n                exec  touch    name      README                         function is empty folder  folder             files   opendir  folder           while   file   readdir  files                 if   file         amp  amp   file                          return true     Not empty                           gt    Then do  git commit -m  message  git push

User · Answer

Maybe adding an empty directory seems like it would be the path of least resistance because you have scripts that expect that directory to exist  maybe because it is a target for generated binaries    Another approach would be to modify your scripts to create the directory as needed   mkdir --parents  generated bin    create a folder for storing generated binaries mv myprogram1 myprogram2  generated bin    populate the directory as needed   In this example  you might check in a  broken  symbolic link to the directory so that you can access it without the   generated  prefix  but this is optional    ln -sf  generated bin bin git add bin   When you want to clean up your source tree you can just   rm -rf  generated    this should be in a  clean  script or in a makefile   If you take the oft-suggested approach of checking in an almost-empty folder  you have the minor complexity of deleting the contents without also deleting the   gitignore  file   You can ignore all of your generated files by adding the following to your root  gitignore    generated

User · Answer

The solution of Jamie Flournoy works great  Here is a bit enhanced version to keep the  htaccess      Ignore everything in this directory     Except this file   gitignore   htaccess   With this solution you are able to commit a empty folder  for example  log   tmp or  cache and the folder will stay empty

User · Answer

Sometimes you have to deal with bad written libraries or software  which need a  real  empty and existing directory  Putting a simple  gitignore or  keep might break them and cause a bug  The following might help in these cases  but no guarantee     First create the needed directory   mkdir empty   Then you add a broken symbolic link to this directory  but on any other case than the described use case above  please use a README with an explanation    ln -s  this directory empty  keep   To ignore files in this directory  you can add it in your root  gitignore   echo   empty   gt  gt   gitignore   To add the ignored file  use a parameter to force it   git add -f empty  keep   After the commit you have a broken symbolic link in your index and git creates the directory  The broken link has some advantages  since it is no regular file and points to no regular file  So it even fits to the part of the question   that contains no files    not by the intention but by the meaning  I guess   find empty -type f   This commands shows an empty result  since no files are present in this directory  So most applications  which get all files in a directory usually do not see this link  at least if they do a  file exists  or a  is readable   Even some scripts will not find any files there     php -r  var export glob  empty         array     0   gt   empty       1   gt   empty          But I strongly recommend to use this solution only in special circumstances  a good written README in an empty directory is usually a better solution   And I do not know if this works with a windows filesystem

User · Answer

touch  keep  On Linux  this creates an empty file named  keep  For what it s worth  this name is agnostic to Git  Secondly  as another user has noted  the  git prefix convention can be reserved for files and directories that Git itself uses for configuration purposes  Alternatively  as noted in another answer  the directory can contain a descriptive README md file instead  Either way this requires that the presence of the file won t cause your application to break

User · Answer

You can t and unfortunately will never be able to  This is a decision made by Linus Torvald himself  He knows what s good for us    There is a rant out there somewhere I read once    I found Re  Empty directories    but maybe there is another one   You have to live with the workarounds   unfortunately

User · Answer

Let s say you need an empty directory named tmp      mkdir tmp   touch tmp  gitignore   git add tmp   echo      gt  tmp  gitignore   git commit -m  Empty directory  tmp   In other words  you need to add the  gitignore file to the index before you can tell Git to ignore it  and everything else in the empty directory

User · Answer

Andy Lester is right  but if your directory just needs to be empty  and not empty empty  you can put an empty  gitignore file in there as a workaround   As an aside  this is an implementation issue  not a fundamental Git storage design problem  As has been mentioned many times on the Git mailing list  the reason that this has not been implemented is that no one has cared enough to submit a patch for it  not that it couldn   t or shouldn   t be done

User · Answer

Just add empty  with no content   gitignore file in the empty directory you want to track  E g  if you want to track empty dir  project content posts then create new empty file  project content posts  gitignore Note   gitkeep is not part of official git

User · Answer

If you want to add a folder that will house a lot of transient data in multiple semantic directories  then one approach is to add something like this to your root  gitignore      app data          app data      md  Then you can commit descriptive README md files  or blank files  doesn t matter  as long as you can target them uniquely like with the   md in this case  in each directory to ensure that the directories all remain part of the repo but the files  with extensions  are kept ignored  LIMITATION    s are not allowed in the directory names   You can fill up all of these directories with xml images files or whatever and add more directories under  app data  over time as the storage needs for your app develop  with the README md files serving to burn in a description of what each storage directory is for exactly    There is no need to further alter your  gitignore or decentralise by creating a new  gitignore for each new directory  Probably not the smartest solution but is terse gitignore-wise and always works for me  Nice and simple

User · Answer

WARNING  This tweak is not truly working as it turns out  Sorry for the inconvenience   Original post below   I found a solution while playing with Git internals    Suppose you are in your repository  Create your empty directory     mkdir path to empty-folder  Add it to the index using a plumbing command and the empty tree SHA-1     git update-index --index-info 040000 tree 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904    path to empty-folder   Type the command and then enter the second line  Press Enter and then Ctrl   D to terminate your input  Note  the format is mode  SPACE  type  SPACE  SHA-1hash  TAB  path  the tab is important  the answer formatting does not preserve it   That s it  Your empty folder is in your index  All you have to do is commit    This solution is short and apparently works fine  see the EDIT    but it is not that easy to remember     The empty tree SHA-1 can be found by creating a new empty Git repository  cd into it and issue git write-tree  which outputs the empty tree SHA-1   EDIT   I ve been using this solution since I found it  It appears to work exactly the same way as creating a submodule  except that no module is defined anywhere  This leads to errors when issuing git submodule init update  The problem is that git update-index rewrites the 040000 tree part into 160000 commit   Moreover  any file placed under that path won t ever be noticed by Git  as it thinks they belong to some other repository  This is nasty as it can easily be overlooked   However  if you don t already  and won t  use any Git submodules in your repository  and the  empty  folder will remain empty or if you want Git to know of its existence and ignore its content  you can go with this tweak  Going the usual way with submodules takes more steps that this tweak

User · Answer

The Ruby on Rails log folder creation way    mkdir log  amp  amp  touch log  gitkeep  amp  amp  git add log  gitkeep   Now the log directory will be included in the tree  It is super-useful when deploying  so you won t have to write a routine to make log directories   The logfiles can be kept out by issuing    echo log dev log  gt  gt   gitignore   but you probably knew that

User · Answer

I search into this question becuase  I create a new directory and it contains many files  Among these files  some I want to add to git repository and some not  But when I do  git status   It only shows   Untracked files     use  git add  lt file gt      to include in what will be committed         trine device android    It does not list the seperate files in this new directory  Then I think maybe I can add this directory only and then deal with the seperate files  So I google  git add directory only    In my situation  I found I can just add one file in the new directory that I am sure I want to add it to git   git add new folder some file   After this   git status  will show the status of seperate files

[git] How can I add an empty directory to a Git repository?

Why would we need empty versioned folders

Some suggested workarounds

.gitkeep approach

Adoption

Examples related to git

Examples related to directory

Examples related to git-add