12/03/2020

.gitignore: Correctly specifying ignore and exclude patterns

I was trying to make git ignore some directories but exclude certain file and directories within it. My directory structure was as follows:

.
└── public
    ├── index.php
    └── typo3conf
        ├── AdditionalConfiguration.Development.php
        ├── AdditionalConfiguration.php
        ├── LocalConfiguration.php
        ├── PackageStates.php
        └── ext
            ├── typo3_base_setup
            └── site_package

I wanted git to ignore everything in public except LocalConfiguration.php, AdditionalConfiguration.php and site_package. My first try looked like this:

/public/*
!/public/typo3conf/LocalConfiguration.php
!/public/typo3conf/AdditionalConfiguration.php
!/public/typo3conf/ext/site_package

But..., that did not work. Git ignored the hole public sub tree. After reading the gitignore documentation and some try and error I came up with a working solution:

/public/*
!/public/typo3conf
/public/typo3conf/*
!/public/typo3conf/LocalConfiguration.php
!/public/typo3conf/AdditionalConfiguration.php
!/public/typo3conf/ext
/public/typo3conf/ext/*
!/public/typo3conf/ext/site_package

It looks like, you have to explicitely specify the exclude (un-ignore) pattern for each directory level. I'm not sure, if this is a bug or not, but it took me a while to figure it out.