gitignore - Whitelisting and subdirectories in Git

Question

I have created a white-list for text files only.

*
!*.txt

Now, I have an untracked text file in a sub-directory - sub/dir/file.txt, and this is NOT shown (it is ignored). Text files in the root directory are shown, however.

Why is that, and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

If you try it that way, it'll fail, because you'll end up blacklisting the directories in your structure.

To solve, you want to blacklist everything that is not a directory, and is not one of the file-types you want to commit, while not blacklisting directories.

The .gitignore file that will do this:

# First, ignore everything
*
# Now, whitelist anything that's a directory
!*/
# And all the file types you're interested in.
!*.one
!*.two
!*.etc

Tested this in a three-level structure white-listing for .txt files in the presence of *.one, *.two and *.three files using a .gitignore located in the root directory of the repository - works for me. You won't have to add .gitignore files to all directories in your structure.

Information I used to figure out the answer came from, amongst other things, this (stackoverflow.com).