.gitignore exclude folder but include specific subfolder

Query explained:

I have the folder application/ which I add to the .gitignore. Inside the application/ folder is the folder application/language/gr. How can I include this folder?

I’ve tried this

application/
!application/language/gr/

with no luck.

How to exclude a folder but include specific subfolder using gitignore?

If you exclude application/, then everything under it will always be excluded (even if some later negative exclusion pattern (“unignore”) might match something under application/).

To do what you want, you have to “unignore” every parent directory of anything that you want to “unignore”. Usually, you end up writing rules for this situation in pairs: ignore everything in a directory, but not some certain subdirectory.

# you can skip this first one if it is not already excluded by prior patterns
!application/

application/*
!application/language/

application/language/*
!application/language/gr/

Note
The trailing /* is significant:

• The pattern dir/ excludes a directory named dir and (implicitly) everything under it.
  With dir/, Git will never look at anything under dir, and thus will never apply any of the “un-exclude” patterns to anything under dir.
• The pattern dir/* says nothing about dir itself; it just excludes everything under dir. With dir/*, Git will process the direct contents of dir, giving other patterns a chance to “un-exclude” some bit of the content (!dir/sub/).

Answer #2:

gitignore.txt: clarify recursive nature of excluded directories

An optional prefix “!” which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again.

It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of that file is excluded. (*)
(*: unless certain conditions are met in git 2.8+, see below)
Git doesn’t list excluded directories for performance reasons, so any patterns on contained files have no effect, no matter where they are defined.

Put a backslash (“\“) in front of the first “!” for patterns that begin with a literal “!“, for example, “\!important!.txt“.

Example to exclude everything except a specific directory foo/bar (note the /* – without the slash, the wildcard would also exclude everything within foo/bar):

 --------------------------------------------------------------
     $ cat .gitignore
     # exclude everything except directory foo/bar
     /*
     !/foo
     /foo/*
     !/foo/bar
 --------------------------------------------------------------

In your case:

application/*
!application/**/
application/language/*
!application/language/**/
!application/language/gr/**

You must white-list folders first, before being able to white-list files within a given folder.

---

So with git 2.9+, this could have actually worked, but was ultimately reverted:

application/
!application/language/gr/

Answer #3:

The first answer is great, but with newer versions of Git (1.8.2 or later), there is a double asterisk pattern you can leverage for a bit more shorthand solution:

# assuming the root folder you want to ignore is 'application'
application/**/*

# the subfolder(s) you want to track:
!application/language/gr/

This way you don’t have to “unignore” parent directory of the subfolder you want to track.

---

With Git 2.17.0 (Not sure how early before this version. Possibly back to 1.8.2), using the ** pattern combined with excludes for each subdirectory leading up to your file(s) works. For example:

# assuming the root folder you want to ignore is 'application'
application/**

# Explicitly track certain content nested in the 'application' folder:
!application/language/
!application/language/gr/
!application/language/gr/** # Example adding all files & folder in the 'gr' folder
!application/language/gr/SomeFile.txt # Example adding specific file in the 'gr' folder

Answer #4:

I’ve found only this actually works.

**/node_modules/*
!**/node_modules/keep-dir

Answer #5:

The only way I got this to work on my machine was to do it this way:

# Ignore all directories, and all sub-directories, and it's contents:
*/*

#Now ignore all files in the current directory 
#(This fails to ignore files without a ".", for example 
#'file.txt' works, but 
#'file' doesn't):
*.*

#Only Include these specific directories and subdirectories:
!wordpress/
!wordpress/*/
!wordpress/*/wp-content/
!wordpress/*/wp-content/themes/
!wordpress/*/wp-content/themes/*
!wordpress/*/wp-content/themes/*/*
!wordpress/*/wp-content/themes/*/*/*
!wordpress/*/wp-content/themes/*/*/*/*
!wordpress/*/wp-content/themes/*/*/*/*/*

Notice how you have to explicitly allow content for each level you want to include. So if I have subdirectories 5 deep under themes, I still need to spell that out.

Answer #6:

I have found a similar case here, where in laravel by default, .gitignore ignores all using asterix, then overrides the public directory. ( This is also the same solution as the main answer @Chris Johnsen, just a bit thinner and more concise maybe.)

*
!public
!.gitignore

This is not sufficient if you run into the OP scenario.

If you want to commit a specific subfolder of public, say for e.g. in your public/products directory you want to include files that are one subfolder deep e.g. to include public/products/a/b.jpg they wont be detected correctly, even if you add them specifically like this !/public/products, !public/products/*, etc..

The solution is to make sure you add an entry for every path level like this to override them all.

*
!.gitignore
!public/
!public/*/
!public/products/
!public/products/*
!public/products/*/
!public/products/*/
!public/products/*/*

Hope you learned something from this post.

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