How to track directories but not their files with Git?

Question

I\'ve recently started using Git and am having trouble with just one thing. How can I track directories without tracking their contents?

For example the site I\'m wo

Answer 1

In order to track only directories but not the files, I did the following. Thanks to the @PeterFarmer's comment on git tracking only files, I've been able to keep all directories excluding the files as described in below.

# exclude everything in every folder
/data/**/*.*

# include only .gitkeep files
!/data/**/*.gitkeep

Adding this to the .gitignore file will do the work. The following is my folder structure.

data/
├── processed
│   ├── dataset1.csv
│   └── dataset2.csv
├── raw
│   ├── raw_dataset1.json
└── test
    ├── subfolder
    │   └── dataset2.csv
    └── reviews.csv

When I do git add . && git status, git only recognizes folders, but not files.

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD ..." to unstage)

        modified:   .gitignore
        new file:   data/processed/.gitkeep
        new file:   data/raw/.gitkeep
        new file:   data/test/.gitkeep
        new file:   data/test/subfolder/.gitkeep

Keep in mind that the following for your .gitignore files:

Prepending slash looks only for the root directory.

/dir

Double asterisk looks for zero or more directories.

/**/