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Trick to keep empty folders on git

· One min read
Ang Xuan Ze

Introduction​

So when I was building this school project, I encountered a requirement to write soem data into local files.

Basically, these are so called temporary files or caches, folders are created during runtime.

Sounds straight forward enough, what's the problem here?

Problem​

So the problem is due to our beloved git. Apparently git will not push empty directories.

For example:

src - main
        - main.java
    - sub

For this folder structure, sub will not be pushed to git. This shouldn't be an issue, most of the time. But let's find some way to make it push.

How​

Easy, just put somethings inside?!

Actually yes, just put something inside. For me, I just create a nto so meaningful file that doesn't look random

.gitkeep

So the folder structure will be:

src - main
        - main.java
    - sub
        - .gitkeep

And the sub folder can be pushed to git now.

Some relatively useless knowledge here.. but here you go :)