I'm not sure if I'm the one to blame for this or not, but the earliest reference to ".gitkeep" I can find online is my 2010 answer on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4250082/28422
Yeah... I don't think you were wrong. Having 100 tiny gitignores makes finding out why something is excluded annoying. Our policy is one root level gitgnore and gitkeeps where required.
Some devs will just open the first gitignore they see and throw stuff into it. No thank you.
I like to make a .local folder at the top of the project, which contains a .gitignore that ignores everything. Then I can effortlessly stash my development notes there without affecting the project .gitignore or messing around within the .git directory.
I agree with you. Empty .gitignore would be a "smell" to me. Whereas .gitkeep tells me exactly what purpose it serves. I like the semantic difference here that you describe. I don't like when multiple .gitignore files are littered throughout the codebase.
It's especially funny since my answer is wrong anyway! The other top answer is much better. I did get a lot of early SO brownie points from that one answer though.
The author makes a very common mistake of not reading the very first line of the documentation for .gitignore.
A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the NOTES below for details.
You should never be putting "!.gitignore" in .gitignore. Just do `echo "*" > .gitignore; git add -f .gitignore`. Once a file is tracked any changes to it will be tracked without needing to use --force with git add.
The point of that line is to robustly survive a rename of the directory which won't be automatically tracked without that line. You have to read between the lines to see this: they complain about this problem with .gitkeep files.
The \n won't be interpreted specially by echo unless it gets the -e option.
Personally if I need a build directory I just have it mkdir itself in my Makefile and rm -rf it in `make clean`. With the article's scheme this would cause `git status` noise that a `/build/` line in a root .gitignore wouldn't. I'm not really sure there's a good tradeoff there.
If you have a project template or a tool that otherwise sets up a project but leaves it in the user's hands to create a git repo for it or commit the project into an existing repo, then it would be better for it to create a self-excepting .gitignore file than to have to instruct the user on special git commands to use later.
I think I'd prefer to have all ignores and un-ignores explicitly in the file and not have some of them defined implicitly because a file was added to tracking at some point.
My preference is to use the build system to create built artifacts, and I consider the build/ directory to be a built artifact. Wrangling Git into doing the first fundamental build step is off, in my opinion.
However, if you disagree, my favorite "Git keep" filename is "README.md". Why is this otherwise empty directory here, how does it fit into my source tree, how is it populated, and so forth.
One of my pet peeves with the latest AI wave is the time we spend creating files to help AI coding agents, but don't give the same consideration to the humans who have to maintain and update our code.
Both points here are appreciated. One that a README file as a "placeholder" for a directory gives the opportunity to describe why said empty directory exists. I would be slightly concerned though if my build process picked up this file during packaging. But that's probably a minor concern and your point stands.
Additionally, the AI comment is ironic as well. It's like we're finally writing good documentation for the sake of agents, in a way that we should have been writing all along for other sentient consumers. It's funny to see documentation now as basically the horse instead of the cart.
Why did Git decide to have no means to track fully empty directories? Like, I understand that e.g. doing "git rm *" inside a directory should probably delete this directory from the repository as well (although "git rm -r dir_to_delete" exists so...) but why not have a command to explicitly force a directory to be tracked, whether it's empty or not?
.gitkeep is intuitive and easy to understand. Unignoring a .gitignore is not intuitive. This falls squarely into "clever optimization tricks that obscure intent and readability". Don't do things like this.
It's not that hard to update a .gitignore file every now and then.
Using the actual tools built in to git directly removes steps in the process, which is always a good thing, it's documented as part of the git documentation, so you don't have to create a wiki page explaining why there is a ".gitkeep" file that git doesn't recognize itself.
Saying "It's not that hard..." is fine for projects with a few contributors but does not scale.
Oh, man, I'd forgotten about these negated .gitignore patterns entirely. It actually hadn't occurred to me that they could override the behaviour of ignoring empty directories.
This is potentially actually useful for me, because I have a project with test data that consists of miniature filesystem sub-trees — that should include empty directories to ensure edge cases are covered. I've been zipping them up and having the test harness unpack them in the test environment, but that's an unnecessary extra point of failure (and it stuffs undiffable binary files into the commit history).
Edit: Ah, no, if this doesn't work from the project-global .gitignore (specifying a folder to keep, even though it's empty and doesn't even have its own .gitignore) then it doesn't solve the problem. :(
Usually, you can. But occasionally you get mildly defective tools that require some directory to exist, even though it's empty. It's easier to add a gitkeep than fix them.
You can. But this makes intent clear. If you clone a git repo and see build/ with only a gitkeep, you are safe to bet your life savings on that being the compiled assets dir.
There may be other directories. I think it's useful to be able to see the entire directory structure of a repo when you check it out, and not just after running some scripts.
What am I missing about this use case? It seems like you should just create `build/.gitignore` with `*` in it and `add -f` it and be done.
I'd use `.gitkeep` (or an empty `.gitignore`) if I needed to commit an otherwise-empty hierarchy. But if I'm going to have a `.gitignore` in there anyway, it's not empty.
> The directory is now “tracked” with a single, standard file that will work even after renames.
Does `.gitkeep` not work after renames? Or `.gitignore`?
It makes the behavior more obvious from simply looking at the file, for one thing, and it means you can just lump it into your next `git add -A` without needing to handle it specially.
If you need to do this, I think .gitkeep communicates intent better. You don't need to document it or risk it being removed as thought to be a left over.
I don't understand why would you ever want to have an empty directory. Besides if I see a directory named "build" I expect to be able to just nuke it any time without consequences.
For me, I put them in directories that have to be there, because the underlying code doesn't create the directory, and without it, it fails.
Another example is where you want an empty directory mounted in Docker. If the directory is not there it is created with root permissions and then I can't even look into it.
I want to like it, but I pretty much always have a "cleanup" script that just deletes the entire directory and touches a .gitkeep file. Obviously an even better pattern is to not have any .gitkeep files, but sometimes they are just handy.
if possible you can also just create directories if they don't exist (ie. mkdir -p) and just exclude it in your root .gitignore (ie. ignore all build directories). That would safe you from creating multiple .gitignore files.
Truly, what purpose does this serve? Defining a hierarchy without using is injecting immediate debt. Just introduce it when stuff goes there! If you really insist then at least put something in the folder. It doesn't take much effort to make the change at least a tiny bit meaningful.
Better yet just do the work. If you want make a commit in a branch that's destined to be squashed or something, sure, but keep it away from the shared history and certainly remove it when it's not needed anymore.
I play around with ComfyUI on my computer to make silly images.
To manually install it, you must clone the repo. Then you have to download models into the right place. Where's the right place? Well, there's an empty directory called models. They go in there.
The simplest answer is that sometimes other existing software that I need to use treats an empty directory (or, hopefully, a directory containing just an irrelevant file like .gitkeep) differently from an absent directory, and I want that software to behave in the first way instead of the second.
A more thorough answer would be: Filesystems can represent empty directories, so a technology that supports versioned filesystems should be able to as well. And if that technology can't quite support fully versioned filesystems -- perhaps because it was never designed with that goal in mind -- but can nevertheless support them well enough to cover a huge number of use cases that people actually have, then massaging it a bit to handle those rough edges still makes sense.
Legitimately asking, please share the name of software that expects/requires an empty directory and interprets .gitkeep in this way, but chokes on a README file.
Many filesystems cannot represent empty directories. Many archive formats also do not. I don't think this a problem in practice. I find this argument extremely weak.
The idea is that instead of adding a nonsense file, you use the native .gitignore functionality.
".gitkeep" is just a human thing; it would work the same if you called it ".blahblah".
So their pitch is that if you want to explicitly keep the existence of the directory as a committed part of the repo, you're better off using the actual .gitignore functionality to check in the .gitignore file but ignore anything else in the directory.
I don't find it amazingly compelling; .gitkeep isn't breaking anything.
Granted, naming is hard. Routinely using a file named .deleteme or .rememberwalkthedog because it's recommended instead of a more readable solution, is not a compelling reason to switch.
File filtering is so delightfully broken everywhere. Everytime I revisit git, rsync, restic, borg, etc. something just goes wrong somewhere on this seemingly simple task, and SO and thus LLMs are filled to the brim with slightly wrong answers. We need a xkcd/927 because it can't possibly get any worse.