Gitignore Reversed – Whitelist Certain Directories to Include

In certain scenarios you may wish to exclude everything and only include files that you specify. Git does allow this however it’s a bit tricky and the terminology of the gitignore file doesn’t help matters.

In the root of your git repository you’ll need this .gitignore file

# Ignore everything:
*
!*/

#ignore php error logs
errors.log
php_errors.log

#ignore the backup 'orig' files produced by kdiff
*.orig

#ignore thumbnails created by windows
Thumbs.db

#misc
.DS_Store
.DS_Store?
ehthumbs.db
_notes
cache
dwsync.xml
.svn
.hg
!.gitignore

And then for each directory that you wish to include, you will need to include this .gitignore file

#exclude the global ignore for this file
!.gitignore

#include everything in this directory
!*

#except these misc
.DS_Store
.DS_Store?
ehthumbs.db
_notes
cache
dwsync.xml
.svn
.hg

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