How can I add an empty directory to a Git reposito

Question

How can I add an empty directory (that contains no files) to a Git repository?

Answer 1

The solution of Jamie Flournoy works great. Here is a bit enhanced version to keep the .htaccess :

# Ignore everything in this directory
*
# Except this file
!.gitignore
!.htaccess

With this solution you are able to commit a empty folder, for example /log, /tmp or /cache and the folder will stay empty.

Answer 2

Here is a hack, but it's funny that it works (Git 2.2.1). Similar to what @Teka suggested, but easier to remember:

• Add a submodule to any repository (git submodule add path_to_repo)
• This will add a folder and a file .submodules. Commit a change.
• Delete .submodules file and commit the change.

Now, you have a directory that gets created when commit is checked out. An interesting thing though is that if you look at the content of tree object of this file you'll get:

fatal: Not a valid object name b64338b90b4209263b50244d18278c0999867193

I wouldn't encourage to use it though since it may stop working in the future versions of Git. Which may leave your repository corrupted.

Answer 3

You can't. See the Git FAQ.

Currently the design of the git index (staging area) only permits files to be listed, and nobody competent enough to make the change to allow empty directories has cared enough about this situation to remedy it.

Directories are added automatically when adding files inside them. That is, directories never have to be added to the repository, and are not tracked on their own.

You can say "git add <dir>" and it will add files in there.

If you really need a directory to exist in checkouts you should create a file in it. .gitignore works well for this purpose; you can leave it empty, or fill in the names of files you expect to show up in the directory.

Answer 4

Let's say you need an empty directory named tmp :

$ mkdir tmp
$ touch tmp/.gitignore
$ git add tmp
$ echo '*' > tmp/.gitignore
$ git commit -m 'Empty directory' tmp

In other words, you need to add the .gitignore file to the index before you can tell Git to ignore it (and everything else in the empty directory).

Answer 5

When you add a .gitignore file, if you are going to put any amount of content in it (that you want Git to ignore) you might want to add a single line with just an asterisk * to make sure you don't add the ignored content accidentally.

Answer 6

As mentioned it's not possible to add empty directories, but here is a one liner that adds empty .gitignore files to all directories.

ruby -e 'require "fileutils" ; Dir.glob(["target_directory","target_directory/**"]).each { |f| FileUtils.touch(File.join(f, ".gitignore")) if File.directory?(f) }'

I have stuck this in a Rakefile for easy access.