How do I ignore everything in my repo except a few files?

Question

I've researched this and I can't seem to bump on a working solution. I have a repo locally and want to ignore everything in it except two files, since those are the only ones necessary to build the program.

What I've tried is this:

Contents of .gitignore:

# Ignore everything
*

# not these files...
!.gitignore
!ApiTest/KLM_Service.cs
!ApiTest/Program.cs

The structure of my repo is this:

.git
ApiTest
  bin
  obj
  Properties
  App.config
  KLM_Service.cs
  Program.cs
.gitignore

I'm on Windows using GIT Bash.

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Answer 1

Based on your repo layout, I would strongly recommend against ignoring everything. While there are a lot of autogenerated files that you don't care about, the autogenerated filenames will never change. Your source code filenames will definitely change, though, which would force you to keep your .gitignore constantly up-to-date.

Since this is C# code, why don't you use a C#-specific .gitignore to start off, like this one ?