gitignore everything except a symlink

Question

I have the following folder structure:

node_modules/
  my_symlink_to_lib
  folder_a/
  folder_b/
lib/
  (some files here)

I want to ignore everything inside node_modules except the symlink:

# Doesn't work
node_modules/*
!node_modules/my_symlink_to_lib

# Doesn't work
node_modules/*
!node_modules/my_symlink_to_lib
!node_modules/my_symlink_to_lib/*

I have tried several other stuff, node_modules/my_symlink_to_lib doesn't end up in untracked files.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Make sure you don't have something like the following in .gitignore_global file:

# ignores the whole folder so negation won't work in local .gitignore
node_modules