Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)
adamj.eu119 points by frou_dh a day ago
119 points by frou_dh a day ago
I'm not sure if I'm the one to blame for this or not, but the earliest reference to ".gitkeep" I can find online is my 2010 answer on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4250082/28422
If this is all my fault, I'm sorry.
This Rails commit from May 2010 mentions gitkeeps and it's a few months older than your SO post, so it seems you're absolved from guilt:
https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/785493ffed41abcca0686b...
Yeah... I don't think you were wrong. Having 100 tiny gitignores makes finding out why something is excluded annoying. Our policy is one root level gitgnore and gitkeeps where required.
Some devs will just open the first gitignore they see and throw stuff into it. No thank you.
I like to make a .local folder at the top of the project, which contains a .gitignore that ignores everything. Then I can effortlessly stash my development notes there without affecting the project .gitignore or messing around within the .git directory.
I agree with you. Empty .gitignore would be a "smell" to me. Whereas .gitkeep tells me exactly what purpose it serves. I like the semantic difference here that you describe. I don't like when multiple .gitignore files are littered throughout the codebase.
> Having 100 tiny gitignores makes finding out why something is excluded annoying. Our policy is one root level gitgnore and gitkeeps where required.
This is not a complicated or important enough problem to justify a team-wide policy. Let it work itself out naturally.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-check-ignore makes it trivial to debug repo-wide gitignore behavior.
I share your view. .keep and .gitignore are different things. Having one .gitignore caputuring everything is less mental load.
This is delightful. Accidental load-bearing SO post.
It's especially funny since my answer is wrong anyway! The other top answer is much better. I did get a lot of early SO brownie points from that one answer though.
Thankfully AI has put an end to the scourge of confidently-wrong SO hallucinations.
My preference is to use the build system to create built artifacts, and I consider the build/ directory to be a built artifact. Wrangling Git into doing the first fundamental build step is off, in my opinion.
However, if you disagree, my favorite "Git keep" filename is "README.md". Why is this otherwise empty directory here, how does it fit into my source tree, how is it populated, and so forth.
One of my pet peeves with the latest AI wave is the time we spend creating files to help AI coding agents, but don't give the same consideration to the humans who have to maintain and update our code.
Both points here are appreciated. One that a README file as a "placeholder" for a directory gives the opportunity to describe why said empty directory exists. I would be slightly concerned though if my build process picked up this file during packaging. But that's probably a minor concern and your point stands.
Additionally, the AI comment is ironic as well. It's like we're finally writing good documentation for the sake of agents, in a way that we should have been writing all along for other sentient consumers. It's funny to see documentation now as basically the horse instead of the cart.
The author makes a very common mistake of not reading the very first line of the documentation for .gitignore.
A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the NOTES below for details.
The point of that line is to robustly survive a rename of the directory which won't be automatically tracked without that line. You have to read between the lines to see this: they complain about this problem with .gitkeep files.
Yeah, this. Plus a mistake from the article:
$ echo '*\n!.gitignore' > build/.gitignore
Personally if I need a build directory I just have it mkdir itself in my Makefile and rm -rf it in `make clean`. With the article's scheme this would cause `git status` noise that a `/build/` line in a root .gitignore wouldn't. I'm not really sure there's a good tradeoff there.
> The \n won't be interpreted specially by echo unless it gets the -e option.
Author's probably using Zsh, which interprets them by default.
If you have a project template or a tool that otherwise sets up a project but leaves it in the user's hands to create a git repo for it or commit the project into an existing repo, then it would be better for it to create a self-excepting .gitignore file than to have to instruct the user on special git commands to use later.
I think I'd prefer to have all ignores and un-ignores explicitly in the file and not have some of them defined implicitly because a file was added to tracking at some point.
This is functionally the same. What do you mean by “you should never”? According to who?
What an arrogant take. This is preference. Don’t mistake it for correctness.
Why did Git decide to have no means to track fully empty directories? Like, I understand that e.g. doing "git rm *" inside a directory should probably delete this directory from the repository as well (although "git rm -r dir_to_delete" exists so...) but why not have a command to explicitly force a directory to be tracked, whether it's empty or not?
.gitkeep is intuitive and easy to understand. Unignoring a .gitignore is not intuitive. This falls squarely into "clever optimization tricks that obscure intent and readability". Don't do things like this.
It's not that hard to update a .gitignore file every now and then.
Then put a comment in the .gitignore.
Using the actual tools built in to git directly removes steps in the process, which is always a good thing, it's documented as part of the git documentation, so you don't have to create a wiki page explaining why there is a ".gitkeep" file that git doesn't recognize itself.
Saying "It's not that hard..." is fine for projects with a few contributors but does not scale.
Not sure why you can’t just have your build script create the build directory?
Usually, you can. But occasionally you get mildly defective tools that require some directory to exist, even though it's empty. It's easier to add a gitkeep than fix them.
This used to happen a lot. But I don't think that many modern builders require existing directory these days.
Your point is valid though. It would be much preferable to include build/ in your root .gitignore so that the directory is never tracked.
Because you might not have a build script?
Then why do you need a build directory?
qemu: mkdir build; cd build; ../configure, some projects are like that
Why can’t the configure script do this?
You can. But this makes intent clear. If you clone a git repo and see build/ with only a gitkeep, you are safe to bet your life savings on that being the compiled assets dir.
There may be other directories. I think it's useful to be able to see the entire directory structure of a repo when you check it out, and not just after running some scripts.
Oh, man, I'd forgotten about these negated .gitignore patterns entirely. It actually hadn't occurred to me that they could override the behaviour of ignoring empty directories.
This is potentially actually useful for me, because I have a project with test data that consists of miniature filesystem sub-trees — that should include empty directories to ensure edge cases are covered. I've been zipping them up and having the test harness unpack them in the test environment, but that's an unnecessary extra point of failure (and it stuffs undiffable binary files into the commit history).
Edit: Ah, no, if this doesn't work from the project-global .gitignore (specifying a folder to keep, even though it's empty and doesn't even have its own .gitignore) then it doesn't solve the problem. :(
Why not having a txt file with indented tree, a bootstrap function that parses the file and creates the tree and a test for that function?
You will have proper diff for the tree this way.
How about fixing your build scripts and makefiles instead? Convoluted solutions for a non-existing problem.
What am I missing about this use case? It seems like you should just create `build/.gitignore` with `*` in it and `add -f` it and be done.
I'd use `.gitkeep` (or an empty `.gitignore`) if I needed to commit an otherwise-empty hierarchy. But if I'm going to have a `.gitignore` in there anyway, it's not empty.
> The directory is now “tracked” with a single, standard file that will work even after renames.
Does `.gitkeep` not work after renames? Or `.gitignore`?
So I am missing something. :)
It makes the behavior more obvious from simply looking at the file, for one thing, and it means you can just lump it into your next `git add -A` without needing to handle it specially.
That's a hack. What you should do is a .gitignore with * and then a whitelist of paths like src/**/*.
If you rely on `add -f` you will forget to commit something important.
For example, for a tree sitter grammar I developed a couple years ago, here is my .gitignore:
```
# Ignore everything
*
# Top-level whitelist
CHANGELOG.md
# Allow git to see inside subdirectories
!*/
# Whitelist the grammar and tests
!/grammar/*.js
!/test/corpus/*.txt
# Whitelist any grammar and tests in subdirectories
!/grammar/**/*.js
!/test/corpus/**/*.txt
```*
> If you rely on `add -f` you will forget to commit something important.
But isn't the idea in TFA to blacklist the entire `build/` tree? We don't want to add anything there.
If you need to do this, I think .gitkeep communicates intent better. You don't need to document it or risk it being removed as thought to be a left over.
Is .gitkeep an established convention somewhere? I'm curious where the name originated.
I don't understand why would you ever want to have an empty directory. Besides if I see a directory named "build" I expect to be able to just nuke it any time without consequences.
For me, I put them in directories that have to be there, because the underlying code doesn't create the directory, and without it, it fails.
Another example is where you want an empty directory mounted in Docker. If the directory is not there it is created with root permissions and then I can't even look into it.
Arent Gitkeep files specifically for empty folders that are intended to be there?
That is what I have always used them for....
I find this use of .gitignore far more common than .gitkeep. I did see one js tool creating them and did wonder what it was about.
I want to like it, but I pretty much always have a "cleanup" script that just deletes the entire directory and touches a .gitkeep file. Obviously an even better pattern is to not have any .gitkeep files, but sometimes they are just handy.
if possible you can also just create directories if they don't exist (ie. mkdir -p) and just exclude it in your root .gitignore (ie. ignore all build directories). That would safe you from creating multiple .gitignore files.
The author is misusing .gitkeep. I use it to keep source code folders that don’t contain any code yet, but whose structure is already defined.
Truly, what purpose does this serve? Defining a hierarchy without using is injecting immediate debt. Just introduce it when stuff goes there! If you really insist then at least put something in the folder. It doesn't take much effort to make the change at least a tiny bit meaningful.
Better yet just do the work. If you want make a commit in a branch that's destined to be squashed or something, sure, but keep it away from the shared history and certainly remove it when it's not needed anymore.
I play around with ComfyUI on my computer to make silly images.
To manually install it, you must clone the repo. Then you have to download models into the right place. Where's the right place? Well, there's an empty directory called models. They go in there.
IMO that's an effective use of gitkeep.
It's not.
echo >repo/models/README.md "this is the directory you place models in"
It could be better sure. In fact I think they use a file called PUT_MODELS_HERE not gitkeep
https://github.com/Comfy-Org/ComfyUI/blob/master/models/diff...
But in any case, that instruction was already in the readme as well.
> Truly, what purpose does this serve?
The simplest answer is that sometimes other existing software that I need to use treats an empty directory (or, hopefully, a directory containing just an irrelevant file like .gitkeep) differently from an absent directory, and I want that software to behave in the first way instead of the second.
A more thorough answer would be: Filesystems can represent empty directories, so a technology that supports versioned filesystems should be able to as well. And if that technology can't quite support fully versioned filesystems -- perhaps because it was never designed with that goal in mind -- but can nevertheless support them well enough to cover a huge number of use cases that people actually have, then massaging it a bit to handle those rough edges still makes sense.
Legitimately asking, please share the name of software that expects/requires an empty directory and interprets .gitkeep in this way, but chokes on a README file.
Many filesystems cannot represent empty directories. Many archive formats also do not. I don't think this a problem in practice. I find this argument extremely weak.
> Many filesystems cannot represent empty directories.
Like which ones? And how does mkdir(1) work on such filesystems?
I'm confused. Having a file gitignored doesn't stop you from committing it; AFAIK you can just
touch build/.gitkeep
git add build/.gitkeep
git commit build/.gitkeep
The idea is that you don't want to check-in any builds.
Sure, so gitignore build/ or whatever. But you don't need to unignore .gitkeep
The idea is that instead of adding a nonsense file, you use the native .gitignore functionality.
".gitkeep" is just a human thing; it would work the same if you called it ".blahblah".
So their pitch is that if you want to explicitly keep the existence of the directory as a committed part of the repo, you're better off using the actual .gitignore functionality to check in the .gitignore file but ignore anything else in the directory.
I don't find it amazingly compelling; .gitkeep isn't breaking anything.
This still confuses me. Do you mean to say "use the .gitignore functionality, and check in the .gitkeep file"?
No. Use a .gitignore instead of .gitkeep. Instead of checking in build/.gitkeep, check in build/.gitignore.
I don't know that I like this approach. It certainly works, but it's not specifically what (people expect) a .gitignore file to be used for. That confusion isn't good: https://thecodelesscode.com/case/222 and https://thecodelesscode.com/case/223
.gitignore is the officially recommended way to do this: https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index...
Granted, naming is hard. Routinely using a file named .deleteme or .rememberwalkthedog because it's recommended instead of a more readable solution, is not a compelling reason to switch.
This doesn’t solve a problem.
File filtering is so delightfully broken everywhere. Everytime I revisit git, rsync, restic, borg, etc. something just goes wrong somewhere on this seemingly simple task, and SO and thus LLMs are filled to the brim with slightly wrong answers. We need a xkcd/927 because it can't possibly get any worse.
Claims the wrong thing is common and tells you not to do it , then tells you to do the right thing.
I have never heard of .gitkeep before today, and if you need an empty directory to exist, use a build script.
Don’t do stupid workarounds.
No, thanks