.gitignore ignore all files then recursively allow *.foo

Question

There's already several questions similar to this, but none of the answers work for me.

I want to ignore everything in the folders below my repository except files with *.foo

(If anyone is wondering how this can be justified - I'm actually making a git repository for all my "Logic" projects - music software on the mac - but I only want to store the actual project files *.logic)

I'm going to spell it out, so we're all on the same plate. Here's what I do, starting from scratch:

Setup:

mkdir temp
cd temp
mkdir testdir
cd testdir
touch include.foo
touch dontinclude.bad
cd..
git init
touch .gitignore

Paste this in to .gitignore

# Ignore all
/*

# But not these files...
!.gitignore
!*.foo

git status

And the only untracked file is .gitignore

if I typed 'git add .' - no change, only .gitignore is seen and my 2 files are ignored.

Why doesn't this work and how can you change the procedure above to make it work?

Here's the extremely similar question where I got the .gitignore file from. I'm using git --version 1.7.7 (also tried 1.7.3) - .gitignore to ignore all files, then recursively allows files of a certain type

Lorislorita

Wait, did you git add .gitignore and git commit -m "added gitignore" ? – Kuykendall

fwiw, the granddaddy of duplicate answers on this topic--one that you should look over--would probably be Make .gitignore ignore everything except a few files - very regular activity and several good answers. I'm a particular fan of this answer, which seems clear and thorough. – Kaiser

Answer 1

Your problem is that the /* pattern at the beginning is matching all files and directories at the top level - including testdir, so everything inside testdir is ignored.

This is what you want:

# Ignore everything
*
# Don't ignore directories, so we can recurse into them
!*/
# Don't ignore .gitignore and *.foo files
!.gitignore
!*.foo

When you do a git add . with this config, you should find you have only .gitignore and *.foo files listed as changes to be committed.

Classified

though, as an aside, in my real world version with .logic files, it mysteriously doesn't work. I've recreated the git repo, checked a million times, copied the .gitignore in exactly, change to .logic, find . -name "*.logic" returns heaps of files but this .gitignore ignores all *.logic files... something stupid is surely going on... probably worth a follow up comment when I finally crack it – Lorislorita

@PandaWood: Make sure you don't have core.excludesfile set in ~/.gitconfig pointing to a file that has a pattern that would exclude your *.logic files. – Classified

I didn't get this, but I was given a hint when I tried to upload these .logic files to DropBox the other day, it failed. Another hint is, I added !*.txt to .gitignore, as I have a few text files, and they began to appear in the tracked list, no worries. So Logic "files" (eg bla.logic) are actually "packages" - the ones you click on in Mac Finder and choose "Show Package Contents" - hence the *.logic in git is not working... how can I store these "files" in git then, might be my next question ;-) – Lorislorita

@PandaWood: I don't know much about Mac OS X packages except from a quick search that indicated they are actually directories. So you will need a pattern to un-ignore whatever files are in package directories. – Classified

yes, that's right, they are basically directories. The files inside can be all sorts of unknowns, so looks like I'll have to go opposite & work out all the files I can reasonably know not to "include" - which is not so bad, in this case. I can probably get away with excluding .wav .m4a backup and a few other things. I wrote this comment to confirm to anyone else doing the same thing with .logic files, that they should probably give up and and do what I'm suggesting with exclusions instead – Lorislorita

@PandaWood: A little bit ugly, but you could use !*.logic/, !*.logic/*, !*.logic/*/* and so on up to a depth you think will capture the deepest directory hierarchy under a *.logic directory. – Classified

I found that "don't ignore subdirectories" line to make excluding recursively work in .gitignore. For example, I wanted not to ignore a directory bar/. To do that, after the lines shown in this answer, I just added !bar/* and !bar/**/* and all the files in bar/ and its subdirectories recursively were not ignored. – Brien

the best gitignore answer I've found on Stackoverflow, due to the 'unignore .gitignore' part – Prepossessing

This solution. Specifically the command that prevents directories from being ignored (!*/) only seems to work if you apply it to the root directory. Therefore, if you want to apply it to a subdirectory you must create a new .gitignore file in the subdir. – Unclench