Exceptions in .gitignore [duplicate]

Question

How can I add an exception to .gitignore, like "ignore all the .dll files BUT myfile.dll"?

Koenraad

Answer 1

Use ! to negate the pattern:

*.dll
!myfile.dll

Ladybird

Answer 2

If you want to ignore whole folder, except some specific files, then write:

MyFolder/*
!MyFolder/CoolFile.txt

This won't work:

MyFolder/
!MyFolder/CoolFile.txt

Affra

Note that this extends to subdirectories as well. For example, this will work: MyFolder/sub/* !MyFolder/sub/file.txt But this won't: MyFolder/* !MyFolder/sub/file.txt – Furr

The reason - " It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of that file is excluded. Git doesn’t list excluded directories for performance reasons, so any patterns on contained files have no effect, no matter where they are defined. " [git-scm.com/docs/gitignore] – Exocentric

So "for performance reasons" I have to manually enter 21 different subfolders that have the same name and were previously ignored by a single line, just so I can exclude one file. 🙄 – Remmer

@endolith, have you found a better way to do it? – Gesticulate

Answer 3

You can also ignore folders like

!src/main/resources/archetype-resources/**/*

you can also ignore nested folder with patterns like

!**/src/test/resources/**/*

For quick creation of .gitignore file try gitignore.io

Twibill

you mean "ignore ignoring them", so they will be included in the source repository ;-) – Hildehildebrand

Answer 4

I did this because I have a folder called /modules that I want to ignore, except everything in the /modules/custom folder. This worked for me. Now my custom modules will get synced to GitHub.

/modules/*
!/modules/custom/

Apperceive

This is the only method that actually worked for me. – Recalcitrate

OMG thank you, exactly what I was trying to do and amazing how many garbage answers I had to sift through to find this. – Sudatory

Answer 5

You can have several .gitignore files working together in a hierarchical manner to achieve your goal. At the root level you may have:

root

*.dll

inside the folder having the myfile.dll you can add another .gitignore file like so:

root/lib/folderwithMyFiledll

!myfile.dll

more info here

An optional prefix "!" which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again. Put a backslash ("\") in front of the first "!" for patterns that begin with a literal "!", for example, "!important!.txt". It is possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of that file is excluded if certain conditions are met. See section NOTES for detail.

Disinterested

The doc snippet you pasted seems out of date. The site currently states that you can't re-include files under parent directories. – Attune