.gitignore in cakephp: ignore everything but files which are named empty

Question

the cakephp project is using so called empty files. empty files are literally named empty and had no information inside.Their only purpose: Empty directories can be commited by versionising via git.

Unfortunately, I have a problem with the /app/tmp directory since it not only includes those empty files but also temporary cached files which shouldnt be indexed at all!

So I try to write a .gitignore file which should ignore everything in /app/tmp but not empty files, here's my not working attempt:

#.gitignore in cakephp root
/app/tmp
!/app/tmp/logs/empty
!/app/tmp/sessions/empty
!/app/tmp/tests/empty
!/app/tmp/cache/models/empty
!/app/tmp/cache/persistent/empty
!/app/tmp/cache/views/empty

What am I missing? Is .gitignore maybe not cappable to so something like this?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Why not just add !empty to the root .gitignore ? Git will apply ignore rules recursively, from repo root to the end-directory. So if you have !empty in root ignore rules, it will be applied everywhere without any repeatitions.

The problem may be if app/tmp contains only ignored file (with any folding level). In this case git will not index app/tmp as it indexes only actualy existing files .