Next.js Hacker News
Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)
38 points by frou_dh 4 hours ago | 21 comments
  • jkubicek
    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.

    • selridge
      This is delightful. Accidental load-bearing SO post.
      • jkubicek
        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.
  • Arrowmaster
    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.
    You should never be putting "!.gitignore" in .gitignore. Just do `echo "*" > .gitignore; git add -f .gitignore`. Once a file is tracked any changes to it will be tracked without needing to use --force with git add.
    • ekipan
      Yeah, this. Plus a mistake from the article:

        $ echo '*\n!.gitignore' > build/.gitignore
      The \n won't be interpreted specially by echo unless it gets the -e option.

      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.

    • AgentME
      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.
  • cortesoft
    Not sure why you can’t just have your build script create the build directory?
    • andybak
      Because you might not have a build script?
  • 8cvor6j844qw_d6
    Is .gitkeep an established convention somewhere? I'm curious where the name originated.
  • yjftsjthsd-h
    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
    And that's it? There's no need to exclude anything.
    • williadc
      The idea is that you don't want to check-in any builds.
      • yjftsjthsd-h
        Sure, so gitignore build/ or whatever. But you don't need to unignore .gitkeep
        • akerl_
          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.

          • dwattttt
            This still confuses me. Do you mean to say "use the .gitignore functionality, and check in the .gitkeep file"?
  • suralind
    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.
  • macote
    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.
    • xyzzy_plugh
      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.

      • abustamam
        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.

      • akoboldfrying
        > 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.

  • peter-m80
    No, thanks