What are the differences between .gitignore and .gitkeep?

git gitignore
Matty picture Matty · Aug 29, 2011 · Viewed 403.5k times · Source

What are the differences between .gitignore and .gitkeep? Are they the same thing with a different name, or do they both serve a different function?

I don't seem to be able to find much documentation on .gitkeep.

Answer

Wooble picture Wooble · Aug 29, 2011

.gitkeep isn’t documented, because it’s not a feature of Git.

Git cannot add a completely empty directory. People who want to track empty directories in Git have created the convention of putting files called .gitkeep in these directories. The file could be called anything; Git assigns no special significance to this name.

There is a competing convention of adding a .gitignore file to the empty directories to get them tracked, but some people see this as confusing since the goal is to keep the empty directories, not ignore them; .gitignore is also used to list files that should be ignored by Git when looking for untracked files.

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