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What are the differences between .gitignore and .gitkeep? Are they the same thing with a different name, or do they both serve a different function?
I don’t seem to be able to find much documentation on .gitkeep.
.gitkeepisn’t documented, because it’s not a feature of Git.Git cannot add a completely empty directory. People who want to track empty directories in Git have created the convention of putting files called
.gitkeepin these directories. The file could be called anything; Git assigns no special significance to this name.There is a competing convention of adding a
.gitignorefile to the empty directories to get them tracked, but some people see this as confusing since the goal is to keep the empty directories, not ignore them;.gitignoreis also used to list files that should be ignored by Git when looking for untracked files.