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?

Answer 1

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! ;)