What are the differences between .gitignore and .gitkeep?

Overview

Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system.

The .gitignore file

Sometimes while adding files and folders, we may want to exclude secret or unwanted ones.

For this exact reason, Git provides a feature called gitignore. We create a file called .gitignore and add a list of files or folders that we don't want to add to the Git repository. It will ignore the files/folders present in the .gitignore file.

Some popular frameworks or libraries will create a .gitignore file automatically and add unwanted or secret files/folders to it.

An example of a .gitignore file of a React project is given below.

Note: You can easily find what to ignore for your project by searching in Github.

The .gitkeep feature

The .gitkeep feature is not a part of Git, but it is a trick we use to add empty directories to a Git repository.

Generally, Git doesn't add empty directories and sometimes we may need to add them to a Git repository. So, we create a .gitkeep file under the empty directory so that the directories are added to the repository.

Note: We can use any name like .empty or .keep; it doesn't necessarily need to be .gitkeep.