How to git ignore subfolders / subdirectories?

Question

I have a lot of projects in my .Net solution. I would like to exclude all \"bin/Debug\" and \"bin/Release\" folders (and their contents), but still include the \"bin\" folde

Answer 1

For ignoring subfolders but not main folder I could only get this to work in Visual Studio Code by placing a dummy readme.txt in the main folder. Only then /*/ checked in the main folder (and no subfolders).

Answer 2

All the above answers are valid, but something that I don't think is mentioned is that once you add a file from that directory into the repo, you can't ignore that directory/subdirectory that contains that file (git will ignore that directive).

To ignore already added files run

$ git rm --cached

Otherwise you'll have to remove all files from the repo's target directory first - and then you can ignore that folder.

Answer 3

Besides putting the correct entries in your .gitignore file, if you're trying to ignore something already added to the repo, you have to do git rm -r /path/to/dir and commit that before you add the dir to your .gitignore file. Otherwise the only thing git will ignore is your ignore directive.

Answer 4

You can use .gitignore in the top level to ignore all directories in the project with the same name. For example:

Debug/
Release/

This should update immediately so it's visible when you do git status. Ensure that these directories are not already added to git, as that will override the ignores.