How do I add an empty directory to a Git repository?

Another way to make a directory stay (almost) empty (in the repository) is to create a .gitignore file inside that directory that contains these four lines:

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

Then you don't have to get the order right the way that you have to do in m104's solution.

This also gives the benefit that files in that directory won't show up as "untracked" when you do a git status.

Making @GreenAsJade's comment persistent:

I think it's worth noting that this solution does precisely what the question asked for, but is not perhaps what many people looking at this question will have been looking for. This solution guarantees that the directory remains empty. It says "I truly never want files checked in here". As opposed to "I don't have any files to check in here, yet, but I need the directory here, files may be coming later".

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.

Create an empty file called .gitkeep in the directory, and git add it.

This will be a hidden file on Unix-like systems by default but it will force Git to acknowledge the existence of the directory since it now has content.

Also note that there is nothing special about this file's name. You could have named it anything you wanted. All Git cares about is that the folder has something in it.

You could always put a README file in the directory with an explanation of why you want this, otherwise empty, directory in the repository.

touch .placeholder

On Linux, this creates an empty file named .placeholder. For what it's worth, this name is agnostic to git, and this approach is used in various other places in the system, e.g. /etc/cron.d/.placeholder. Secondly, as another user has noted, the .git prefix convention can be reserved for files and directories that Git itself uses for configuration purposes.

Alternatively, as noted in another answer, the directory can contain a descriptive README.md file instead.

Either way this requires that the presence of the file won't cause your application to break.

Why would we need empty versioned folders

First things first:

An empty directory cannot be part of a tree under the Git versioning system.

It simply won't be tracked. But there are scenarios in which "versioning" empty directories can be meaningful, for example:

• scaffolding a predefined folder structure, making it available to every user/contributor of the repository; or, as a specialized case of the above, creating a folder for temporary files, such as a cache/ or logs/ directories, where we want to provide the folder but .gitignore its contents
• related to the above, some projects won't work without some folders (which is often a hint of a poorly designed project, but it's a frequent real-world scenario and maybe there could be, say, permission problems to be addressed).

Some suggested workarounds

Many users suggest:

1. Placing a README file or another file with some content in order to make the directory non-empty, or
2. Creating a .gitignore file with a sort of "reverse logic" (i.e. to include all the files) which, at the end, serves the same purpose of approach #1.

While both solutions surely work I find them inconsistent with a meaningful approach to Git versioning.

• Why are you supposed to put bogus files or READMEs that maybe you don't really want in your project?
• Why use .gitignore to do a thing (keeping files) that is the very opposite of what it's meant for (excluding files), even though it is possible?

.gitkeep approach

Use an empty file called .gitkeep in order to force the presence of the folder in the versioning system.

Although it may seem not such a big difference:

• You use a file that has the single purpose of keeping the folder. You don't put there any info you don't want to put.

  For instance, you should use READMEs as, well, READMEs with useful information, not as an excuse to keep the folder.

  Separation of concerns is always a good thing, and you can still add a .gitignore to ignore unwanted files.

• Naming it .gitkeep makes it very clear and straightforward from the filename itself (and also to other developers, which is good for a shared project and one of the core purposes of a Git repository) that this file is

  • A file unrelated to the code (because of the leading dot and the name)
  • A file clearly related to Git
  • Its purpose (keep) is clearly stated and consistent and semantically opposed in its meaning to ignore

Adoption

I've seen the .gitkeep approach adopted by very important frameworks like Laravel, Angular-CLI.

As described in other answers, Git is unable to represent empty directories in its staging area. (See the Git FAQ.) However, if, for your purposes, a directory is empty enough if it contains a .gitignore file only, then you can create .gitignore files in empty directories only via:

find . -type d -empty -exec touch {}/.gitignore \;

Andy Lester is right, but if your directory just needs to be empty, and not empty empty, you can put an empty .gitignore file in there as a workaround.

As an aside, this is an implementation issue, not a fundamental Git storage design problem. As has been mentioned many times on the Git mailing list, the reason that this has not been implemented is that no one has cared enough to submit a patch for it, not that it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done.

Add a .gitkeep file inside the empty directory and commit it.

touch .gitkeep

.gitkeep is a hidden file, to list it in linux run command

ll -a

It is the standard followed by Git.

TL;DR: slap a file in the directory and it will be tracked by git. (seriously. that is the official workaround)

But I recommend instead: let a build script or deploy script create the directory on site.

The official way:

Git does not track empty directories. See the official Git FAQ for more detail. The suggested workaround is to put a .gitignore file in the empty directory. With the file in place the directory is no longer empty and will be tracked by git.

I do not like that workaround. The file .gitignore is meant to ignore things. Here it is used for the opposite: to keep something.

A common workaround (to the workaround) is to name the file .gitkeep. This at least conveys the intention in the filename. Also it seems to be a consensus among some projects. Git itself does not care what the file is named. It just cares if the directory is empty or not.

There is a problem shared by both .gitkeep and .gitignore: the file is hidden by unix convention. Some tools like ls or cp dir/* will pretend the file does not exists and behave as if the directory is empty. Other tools like find -empty will not. Newbie unix users might get stumped on this. Seasoned unix users will deduce that there are hidden files and check for them. Regardless; this is an avoidable annoyance.

Side note: a simple solution to the "hidden file problematic" is to name the file gitkeep (without the leading dot). We can take this one step further and name the file README. Then, in the file, explain why the directory needs to be empty and be tracked in git. That way other developers (and future you) can read up why things are the way they are.

Summary: slap a file in the directory and now the (formerly empty) directory is tracked by git.

Potential Problem: the directory is no longer empty.

The assumption is that you need the empty directory because you are collecting files in it to process later. But now you not only have the files you want but also one rogue .gitignore or gitkeep or what have you. This might complicate simple bash constructs like for file in dirname/* because you need to exclude or special case the extra file.

Git does not want to track empty directories. By trying to make git track the empty directory you sacrifice the very thing you were trying to preserve: the empty directory.

Also: spurious "empty" directories in the project directory are problems-to-be. A new developer, or future you, will stumble upon the empty directory and wonder why it needs to be there. You might delete the directory. You might put other files in it. You might even create a second workflow which also uses the empty directory. Then some time in the future it happens that both workflows using the empty directory run simultaneously and all scripts fail because the files make no sense and both teams wonder where the other files have come from.

My recommendation: let a build script or deploy script create the directory on site.

Lets take a few steps back. To before you asked how to make git track an empty directory.

The situation you had then was likely the following: you have a tool that needs an empty directory to work. You want to deploy/distribute this tool and you want the empty directory to also be deployed. Problem: git does not track empty directories.

Now instead of trying to get git to track empty directories lets explore the other options. Maybe (hopefully) you have a deploy script. Let the deploy script create the directory after git clone. Or you have a build script. Let the build script create the directory after compiling. Or maybe even modify the tool itself to check for and create the directory before use.

If the tool is meant to be used by humans in diverse environments then I would let the tool itself check and create the directories. If you cannot modify the tool, or the tool is used in a highly automatized manner (docker container deploy, work, destroy), then the deploy script would be good place to create the directories.

I think this is the more sensible approach to the problem. Build scripts and deploy scripts are meant to prepare things to run the program. Your tool requires an empty directory. So use those scripts to create the empty directory.

Bonus: the directory is guaranteed to be truly empty when about to be used. Also other developers (and future you) will not stumble upon an "empty" directory in the repository and wonder why it needs to be there.

TL;DR: let the build script or the deploy script create the empty directory on site. or let the tool itself check for and create the directory before use.

The following commands might help you if you inherited a project containing empty or "empty" directories.

To list every empty directory:

find -type d -empty

Same but avoid looking in the .git directory:

find -name .git -prune -o -type d -empty -print

To list every directory containing a file named .gitkeep:

find -type f -name .gitkeep

To list every directory and the number of files it contains:

find -type f -printf "%h\n" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Now you can examine all directories containing exactly one file and check if it is a "git keep" file. Note this command does not list directories that are truly empty.

WARNING: This tweak is not truly working as it turns out. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Original post below:

I found a solution while playing with Git internals!

1. Suppose you are in your repository.

2. Create your empty directory:

   $ mkdir path/to/empty-folder
   

3. Add it to the index using a plumbing command and the empty tree SHA-1:

   $ git update-index --index-info
   040000 tree 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904    path/to/empty-folder
   

   Type the command and then enter the second line. Press Enter and then Ctrl + D to terminate your input. Note: the format is mode [SPACE] type [SPACE] SHA-1hash [TAB] path (the tab is important, the answer formatting does not preserve it).

4. That's it! Your empty folder is in your index. All you have to do is commit.

This solution is short and apparently works fine (see the EDIT!), but it is not that easy to remember...

The empty tree SHA-1 can be found by creating a new empty Git repository, cd into it and issue git write-tree, which outputs the empty tree SHA-1.

EDIT:

I've been using this solution since I found it. It appears to work exactly the same way as creating a submodule, except that no module is defined anywhere. This leads to errors when issuing git submodule init|update. The problem is that git update-index rewrites the 040000 tree part into 160000 commit.

Moreover, any file placed under that path won't ever be noticed by Git, as it thinks they belong to some other repository. This is nasty as it can easily be overlooked!

However, if you don't already (and won't) use any Git submodules in your repository, and the "empty" folder will remain empty or if you want Git to know of its existence and ignore its content, you can go with this tweak. Going the usual way with submodules takes more steps that this tweak.

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).

The Ruby on Rails log folder creation way:

mkdir log && touch log/.gitkeep && git add log/.gitkeep

Now the log directory will be included in the tree. It is super-useful when deploying, so you won't have to write a routine to make log directories.

The logfiles can be kept out by issuing,

echo log/dev.log >> .gitignore

but you probably knew that.

Maybe adding an empty directory seems like it would be the path of least resistance because you have scripts that expect that directory to exist (maybe because it is a target for generated binaries). Another approach would be to modify your scripts to create the directory as needed.

mkdir --parents .generated/bin ## create a folder for storing generated binaries
mv myprogram1 myprogram2 .generated/bin ## populate the directory as needed

In this example, you might check in a (broken) symbolic link to the directory so that you can access it without the ".generated" prefix (but this is optional).

ln -sf .generated/bin bin
git add bin

When you want to clean up your source tree you can just:

rm -rf .generated ## this should be in a "clean" script or in a makefile

If you take the oft-suggested approach of checking in an almost-empty folder, you have the minor complexity of deleting the contents without also deleting the ".gitignore" file.

You can ignore all of your generated files by adding the following to your root .gitignore:

.generated

I like the answers by Artur79 and mjs, so I've been using a combination of both and made it a standard for our projects.

find . -type d -empty -exec touch {}/.gitkeep \;

However, only a handful of our developers work on Mac or Linux. A lot work on Windows, and I could not find an equivalent simple one-liner to accomplish the same there. Some were lucky enough to have Cygwin installed for other reasons, but prescribing Cygwin just for this seemed overkill.

So, since most of our developers already have Ant installed, the first thing I thought of was to put together an Ant build file to accomplish this independently of the platform. This can still be found here

However, it would be better to make this into a small utility command, so I recreated it using Python and published it to the PyPI here. You can install it by simply running:

pip3 install gitkeep2

It will allow you to create and remove .gitkeep files recursively, and it will also allow you to add messages to them for your peers to understand why those directories are important. This last bit is bonus. I thought it would be nice if the .gitkeep files could be self-documenting.

$ gitkeep --help
Usage: gitkeep [OPTIONS] PATH

  Add a .gitkeep file to a directory in order to push them into a Git repo
  even if they're empty.

  Read more about why this is necessary at: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/inde
  x.php/Git_FAQ#Can_I_add_empty_directories.3F

Options:
  -r, --recursive     Add or remove the .gitkeep files recursively for all
                      sub-directories in the specified path.
  -l, --let-go        Remove the .gitkeep files from the specified path.
  -e, --empty         Create empty .gitkeep files. This will ignore any
                      message provided
  -m, --message TEXT  A message to be included in the .gitkeep file, ideally
                      used to explain why it's important to push the specified
                      directory to source control even if it's empty.
  -v, --verbose       Print out everything.
  --help              Show this message and exit.

This solution worked for me.

1. Add a .gitignore file to your empty directory:

*
*/
!.gitignore

• * ignore all files in the folder
• */ Ignore subdirectories
• !.gitignore include the .gitignore file

2. Then remove your cache, stage your files, commit and push:

git rm -r --cached .
git add . // or git stage .
git commit -m ".gitignore fix"
git push

You can't and unfortunately will never be able to. This is a decision made by Linus Torvald himself. He knows what's good for us.

There is a rant out there somewhere I read once.

I found Re: Empty directories.., but maybe there is another one.

You have to live with the workarounds...unfortunately.

I've been facing the issue with empty directories, too. The problem with using placeholder files is that you need to create them, and delete them, if they are not necessary anymore (because later on there were added sub-directories or files. With big source trees managing these placeholder files can be cumbersome and error prone.

This is why I decided to write an open source tool which can manage the creation/deletion of such placeholder files automatically. It is written for .NET platform and runs under Mono (.NET for Linux) and Windows.

Just have a look at: http://code.google.com/p/markemptydirs

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.

Reading ofavre's and stanislav-bashkyrtsev's answers using broken Git submodule references to create the Git directories, I'm surprised that nobody has suggested yet this simple amendment of the idea to make the whole thing sane and safe:

Rather than hacking a fake submodule into Git, just add an empty real one.

Enter: https://gitlab.com/empty-repo/empty.git

A Git repository with exactly one commit:

commit e84d7b81f0033399e325b8037ed2b801a5c994e0
Author: Nobody <none>
Date: Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000

No message, no committed files.

Usage

To add an empty directory to you GIT repo:

git submodule add https://gitlab.com/empty-repo/empty.git path/to/dir

To convert all existing empty directories to submodules:

find . -type d -empty -delete -exec git submodule add -f https://gitlab.com/empty-repo/empty.git \{\} \;

Git will store the latest commit hash when creating the submodule reference, so you don't have to worry about me (or GitLab) using this to inject malicious files. Unfortunately I have not found any way to force which commit ID is used during checkout, so you'll have to manually check that the reference commit ID is e84d7b81f0033399e325b8037ed2b801a5c994e0 using git submodule status after adding the repo.

Still not a native solution, but the best we probably can have without somebody getting their hands really, really dirty in the GIT codebase.

Appendix: Recreating this commit

You should be able to recreate this exact commit using (in an empty directory):

# Initialize new GIT repository
git init

# Set author data (don't set it as part of the `git commit` command or your default data will be stored as “commit author”)
git config --local user.name "Nobody"
git config --local user.email "none"

# Set both the commit and the author date to the start of the Unix epoch (this cannot be done using `git commit` directly)
export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000"
export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000"

# Add root commit
git commit --allow-empty --allow-empty-message --no-edit

Creating reproducible Git commits is surprisingly hard…

There's no way to get Git to track directories, so the only solution is to add a placeholder file within the directory that you want Git to track.

The file can be named and contain anything you want, but most people use an empty file named .gitkeep (although some people prefer the VCS-agnostic .keep).

The prefixed . marks it as a hidden file.

Another idea would be to add a README file explaining what the directory will be used for.

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.

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.

A PowerShell version:

Find all the empty folders in the directory

Add a empty .gitkeep file in there

Get-ChildItem 'Path to your Folder' -Recurse -Directory | Where-Object {[System.IO.Directory]::GetFileSystemEntries($_.FullName).Count -eq 0} | ForEach-Object { New-Item ($_.FullName + "\.gitkeep") -ItemType file}

I always build a function to check for my desired folder structure and build it for me within the project. This gets around this problem as the empty folders are held in Git by proxy.

function check_page_custom_folder_structure () {
    if (!is_dir(TEMPLATEPATH."/page-customs"))
        mkdir(TEMPLATEPATH."/page-customs");    
    if (!is_dir(TEMPLATEPATH."/page-customs/css"))
        mkdir(TEMPLATEPATH."/page-customs/css");
    if (!is_dir(TEMPLATEPATH."/page-customs/js"))
        mkdir(TEMPLATEPATH."/page-customs/js");
}

This is in PHP, but I am sure most languages support the same functionality, and because the creation of the folders is taken care of by the application, the folders will always be there.

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.

If you want to add a folder that will house a lot of transient data in multiple semantic directories, then one approach is to add something like this to your root .gitignore...

/app/data/**/*.* !/app/data/**/*.md

Then you can commit descriptive README.md files (or blank files, doesn't matter, as long as you can target them uniquely like with the *.md in this case) in each directory to ensure that the directories all remain part of the repo but the files (with extensions) are kept ignored. LIMITATION: .'s are not allowed in the directory names!

You can fill up all of these directories with xml/images files or whatever and add more directories under /app/data/ over time as the storage needs for your app develop (with the README.md files serving to burn in a description of what each storage directory is for exactly).

There is no need to further alter your .gitignore or decentralise by creating a new .gitignore for each new directory. Probably not the smartest solution but is terse gitignore-wise and always works for me. Nice and simple! ;)

Sometimes you have to deal with bad written libraries or software, which need a "real" empty and existing directory. Putting a simple .gitignore or .keep might break them and cause a bug. The following might help in these cases, but no guarantee...

First create the needed directory:

mkdir empty

Then you add a broken symbolic link to this directory (but on any other case than the described use case above, please use a README with an explanation):

ln -s .this.directory empty/.keep

To ignore files in this directory, you can add it in your root .gitignore:

echo "/empty" >> .gitignore

To add the ignored file, use a parameter to force it:

git add -f empty/.keep

After the commit you have a broken symbolic link in your index and git creates the directory. The broken link has some advantages, since it is no regular file and points to no regular file. So it even fits to the part of the question "(that contains no files)", not by the intention but by the meaning, I guess:

find empty -type f

This commands shows an empty result, since no files are present in this directory. So most applications, which get all files in a directory usually do not see this link, at least if they do a "file exists" or a "is readable". Even some scripts will not find any files there:

$ php -r "var_export(glob('empty/.*'));"
array (
  0 => 'empty/.',
  1 => 'empty/..',
)

But I strongly recommend to use this solution only in special circumstances, a good written README in an empty directory is usually a better solution. (And I do not know if this works with a windows filesystem...)

An easy way to do this is by adding a .gitkeep file to the directory you wish to (currently) keep empty.

See this SOF answer for further info - which also explains why some people find the competing convention of adding a .gitignore file (as stated in many answers here) confusing.

Adding one more option to the fray.

Assuming you would like to add a directory to git that, for all purposes related to git, should remain empty and never have it's contents tracked, a .gitignore as suggested numerous times here, will do the trick.

The format, as mentioned, is:

*
!.gitignore

Now, if you want a way to do this at the command line, in one fell swoop, while inside the directory you want to add, you can execute:

$ echo "*" > .gitignore && echo '!.gitignore' >> .gitignore && git add .gitignore

Myself, I have a shell script that I use to do this. Name the script whatever you whish, and either add it somewhere in your include path, or reference it directly:

#!/bin/bash

dir=''

if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
    dir="$1/"
fi

echo "*" > $dir.gitignore && \
echo '!.gitignore' >> $dir.gitignore && \
git add $dir.gitignore

With this, you can either execute it from within the directory you wish to add, or reference the directory as it's first and only parameter:

$ ignore_dir ./some/directory

Another option (in response to a comment by @GreenAsJade), if you want to track an empty folder that MAY contain tracked files in the future, but will be empty for now, you can ommit the * from the .gitignore file, and check that in. Basically, all the file is saying is "do not ignore me", but otherwise, the directory is empty and tracked.

Your .gitignore file would look like:

!.gitignore

That's it, check that in, and you have an empty, yet tracked, directory that you can track files in at some later time.

The reason I suggest keeping that one line in the file is that it gives the .gitignore purpose. Otherwise, some one down the line may think to remove it. It may help if you place a comment above the line.