Git Tracks Files, Not Folders

Git doesn’t track folders. This may bother us when we create empty folders as placeholders in a project—for example, an empty images folder at the beginning of a web project.

Add a hidden file

If we need to track folders, we usually add a hidden file there. Communities often use an empty .gitkeep file for this purpose, but it’s not a standard. We may pick any file name to commit the file and track the folder path.

For example, if we create a folder named images and call git status, we won’t see the newly created folder. But if we put a file in this folder, we see it. We can test this with the following commands in the terminal provided below:

$ mkdir images
$ git status
$ touch images/.gitkeep
$ git status

Here, we see the images file as an untracked file.