.gitkeep
• 95 words • 1 min • updated
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I’m not sure if this is well-known, so here’s a short anecdotal blog post:
git cannot track empty directories.
I wanted to add a drafts/ folder to my blog repository, alongside a
.gitignore containing drafts/*.md so that my staging posts wouldn’t be
accidentally checked into version control.
If drafts/ is supposed to be empty, then how can I check it into version
control?
The answer is to create a dummy
.gitkeep file inside it with touch drafts/.gitkeep. This way I can
push the
drafts/ directory to VCS. And it will remain empty (of markdown files)!