Track Empty Directories with git

By  on  

There are times when you'd like to track an empty directory within git but there's a problem: git wont allow you to add a directory that doesn't have a file in it.  The easy solution is putting an empty stub file within the directory, and the industry standard for that stub file name is .gitkeep.

You can quickly create the file and commit the "empty" directory from command line:

touch my-empty-dir/.gitkeep
git add my-empty-dir/.gitkeep
git commit -m "Adding my empty directory"

The problem is simple, the solution is easy, but I wanted to highlight that .gitkeep is the industry standard.

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    PHP IMDB Scraper

    It's been quite a while since I've written a PHP grabber and the itch finally got to me. This time the victim is the International Movie Database, otherwise known as IMDB. IMDB has info on every movie ever made (or so it seems). Their...

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Table Plugin

    I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class. The XHTML You may have as many tables as...

Discussion

  1. Mathew

    If you want to keep empty directory in git and be sure that its eventually content won’t be pushed, you have to add line in .gitignore. Going to the point, .gitkeep is one of the methods and the more common (from my experience) is to create .gitignore with

    *
    !.gitignore
    
  2. Michal

    I’d be interested where the “.gitkeep is the industry standard” came from. Last time I was looking at a couple of repositories, the preference was an empty .gitignore file.

  3. Good tips, Mathew and David!

    @Mathew: When I use this tip, I usually include */ as well to exclude subfolders. This can be pretty handy for those log/, cache, and sessions types of directories.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!