Make .gitignore ignore everything except a few files

Question

I understand that a .gitignore file cloaks specified files from Git\'s version control. I have a project (LaTeX) that generates lots of extra files (.auth, .dvi, .pdf, logs,

Answer 1

You want to use /* instead of * or */ in most cases

Using * is valid, but it works recursively. It won't look into directories from then on out. People recommend using !*/ to whitelist directories again, but it's actually better to blacklist the highest level folder with /*

# Blacklist files/folders in same directory as the .gitignore file
/*

# Whitelist some files
!.gitignore
!README.md

# Ignore all files named .DS_Store or ending with .log
**/.DS_Store
**.log

# Whitelist folder/a/b1/ and folder/a/b2/
# trailing "/" is optional for folders, may match file though.
# "/" is NOT optional when followed by a *
!folder/
folder/*
!folder/a/
folder/a/*
!folder/a/b1/
!folder/a/b2/
!folder/a/file.txt

# Adding to the above, this also works...
!/folder/a/deeply
/folder/a/deeply/*
!/folder/a/deeply/nested
/folder/a/deeply/nested/*
!/folder/a/deeply/nested/subfolder

The above code would ignore all files except for .gitignore, README.md, folder/a/file.txt, folder/a/b1/ and folder/a/b2/ and everything contained in those last two folders. (And .DS_Store and *.log files would be ignored in those folders.)

Obviously I could do e.g. !/folder or !/.gitignore too.

More info: http://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

Answer 2

I got this working

# Vendor
/vendor/braintree/braintree_php/*
!/vendor/braintree/braintree_php/lib

Answer 3

That's what have worked for me, I wanted to commit only one Cordova plugin to the repo:

...
plugins/*
!plugins/cordova-plugin-app-customization

Answer 4

To exclude folder from .gitignore, the following can be done.

!app/

app/*
!app/bower_components/

app/bower_components/*
!app/bower_components/highcharts/

This will ignore all files/subfolders inside bower_components except for /highcharts.

Answer 5

I tried all answers as given here above, but none worked for me. After reading the gitignore documentation (here) i found out that if you exclude a folder first that the filenames in the subfolder are not being indexed. So if you use the exclamation mark afterwards to include a file, it is not found in the index and thus not being included in your git client.

That was the way to finding the solution. I started with adding exceptions for all subfolders in my folder tree to get it working, which is a hell of a job. Afterwards i was able to compact the detailed configuration to the configuration below, which is a bit contrary to the documentation..

Working .gitignore:

# Ignore the 'Pro' folder, except for the '3rdparty' subfolder 
/Pro/*
!Pro/3rdparty/

# Ignore the '3rdparty' folder, except for the 'domain' subfolder
/Pro/3rdparty/*
!Pro/3rdparty/domain/

# Ignore the 'domain' folder, except for the 'modulename' subfolder
Pro/3rdparty/domain/*
!Pro/3rdparty/domain/modulename/

As result i see in my git client that only the two files inside the Pro/3rdparty/domain/modulename/ folder are being staged for the next commit, and that was exactly what i was looking for.

And if you need to whitelist several subfolders of the same folder then group the exclamation mark lines below the exclude statement like this:

# Ignore the 'Pro' folder, except for the '3rdparty' subfolder 
/Pro/*
!Pro/3rdparty/

# Ignore the '3rdparty' folder, except for the 'domain' & 'hosting' subfolders
/Pro/3rdparty/*
!Pro/3rdparty/domain/
!Pro/3rdparty/hosting/

# Ignore the 'domain' folder, except for the 'modulename' subfolder
Pro/3rdparty/domain/*
!Pro/3rdparty/domain/modulename/

# Ignore the 'hosting' folder, except for the 'modulename' subfolder
Pro/3rdparty/hosting/*
!Pro/3rdparty/hosting/modulename/

Else it wont work as expected.

Answer 6

Nothing worked for me so far because I was trying to add one jar from lib.

This did not worked:

build/*
!build/libs/*
!build/libs/
!build/libs/myjarfile.jar 

This worked:

build/*
!build/libs