What are the differences between .gitignore and .gitkeep?

.gitkeep isn’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 .gitkeep in these directories. The file could be called anything; Git assigns no special significance to this name.

There is a competing convention of adding a .gitignore file 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; .gitignore is also used to list files that should be ignored by Git when looking for untracked files.

.gitkeep is just a placeholder. A dummy file, so Git will not forget about the directory, since Git tracks only files.

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If you want an empty directory and make sure it stays 'clean' for Git, create a .gitignore containing the following lines within:

# .gitignore sample
# Ignore all files in this dir...
*

# ... except for this one.
!.gitignore

If you desire to have only one type of files being visible to Git, here is an example how to filter everything out, except .gitignore and all .txt files:

# .gitignore to keep just .txt files
# Filter everything...
*

# ... except the .gitignore...
!.gitignore

# ... and all text files.
!*.txt