How to git ignore subfolders / subdirectories?

Question

I have a lot of projects in my .Net solution. I would like to exclude all "bin/Debug" and "bin/Release" folders (and their contents), but still include the "bin" folder itself and any dll's contained therein.

.gitignore with "bin/" ignores "Debug" and "Release" folders, but also any dll's contained in the "bin" folder.

bin/Debug or bin/Release in the .gitignore file does not exclude the directories unless I fully qualify the ignore pattern as Solution/Project/bin/Debug - which I don't want to do as I will need to include this full pattern for each project in my solution, as well as add it for any new projects added.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Have you tried wildcards?

Solution/*/bin/Debug
Solution/*/bin/Release

With version 1.8.2 of git, you can also use the ** wildcard to match any level of subdirectories:

**/bin/Debug/
**/bin/Release/

Answer 2

You can use .gitignore in the top level to ignore all directories in the project with the same name. For example:

Debug/
Release/

This should update immediately so it's visible when you do git status. Ensure that these directories are not already added to git, as that will override the ignores.

Answer 3

All the above answers are valid, but something that I don't think is mentioned is that once you add a file from that directory into the repo, you can't ignore that directory/subdirectory that contains that file (git will ignore that directive).

To ignore already added files run

$ git rm -r --cached

Otherwise you'll have to remove all files from the repo's target directory first - and then you can ignore that folder.

Answer 4

The question isn't asking about ignoring all subdirectories, but I couldn't find the answer anywhere, so I'll post it: */*.

Answer 5

Besides putting the correct entries in your .gitignore file, if you're trying to ignore something already added to the repo, you have to do git rm -r /path/to/dir and commit that before you add the dir to your .gitignore file. Otherwise the only thing git will ignore is your ignore directive.

Answer 6

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/

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.

This is from @Yarin's comment here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5250314/1696153

These were useful topics:

• How do negated patterns work in .gitignore?
• How do gitignore exclusion rules actually work?

I also tried

*
*/*
**/**

and **/wp-content/themes/**

or /wp-content/themes/**/*

None of that worked for me, either. Lots of trail and error!

Answer 7

To exclude content and subdirectories:

**/bin/*

To just exclude all subdirectories but take the content, add "/":

**/bin/*/

Answer 8

To ignore all subdirectories you can simply use:

**/

This works as of version 1.8.2 of git.

Answer 9

The generic way to ignore all subfolders, while continuing to track the files that are in the /bin directory would be to add the following line to your project's .gitignore file:

bin/*/*

If you want to ignore only particular named subfolders, you can do:

bin/Debug/*
bin/Release/*

nb. if the bin directory is not in the root of your project (alongside the .gitignore file), then instead of eg. bin/*/* you might need path/to/bin/*/*

Answer 10

Seems this page still shows up on the top of Google search after so many years...

Modern versions of Git support nesting .gitignore files within a single repo. Just place a .gitignore file in the subdirectory that you want ignored. Use a single asterisk to match everything in that directory:

echo "*" > /path/to/bin/Debug/.gitignore
echo "*" > /path/to/bin/Release/.gitignore

If you've made previous commits, remember to remove previously tracked files:

git rm -rf /path/to/bin/Debug
git rm -rf /path/to/bin/Release

You can confirm it by doing git status to show you all the files removed from tracking.

Answer 11

The simplest form to ignore all subfolders of the root of your repo in your .gitignore file is:

*/

If you want ignore all subfolders of another subfolder:

subfolder/*/

If you have already commited items that need to be ignored, you will need to remove them from the repo before they are ignored.

To remove all subfolders of the root of your repo:

git rm -r --cached */*

To remove all subfolders of another subfolder:

git rm -r --cached subfolder/*/*

Answer 12

For ignoring subfolders but not main folder I could only get this to work in Visual Studio Code by placing a dummy readme.txt in the main folder. Only then /*/ checked in the main folder (and no subfolders).