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This article outlines the steps to make Git ignore all but a few files in a Git repository. The .gitignore file is a useful Git utility that allows us to tell Git which files to track and which files not to track.

If you want your .gitignore file to ignore everything except a few files, stay put, we have a lot of files to unpack.

Ignore everything except certain files in Git

Take this hypothetical situation as an example.

We have over a dozen files added to our repository and only want to share our work on files, namely run.py, index.html, and package.json.

One way is to add these files to the index using the git add command. Another way involves the .gitignore file.

How do we tell gitignore to ignore everything except these three files?

If the file is in the root directory, we can edit our .gitignore file as shown below.

# Ignore everything
/*
# Except these files
!.gitignore
!run.py
!index.html
!package.json

This will make Git ignore everything except the above files. What if our files are in a subdirectory?

Let's say our files are all in a directory called apps and there are other files in the same directory. This is what our .gitignore file looks like.

# Ignore everything
/*
# do not ignore the .gitignore file
!.gitignore
#do not ignore the apps directory
!/apps
# ignore everything in the apps directory
/apps/*
# do not ignore these files in the apps directory
!/apps/run.py
!/apps/index.html
!/apps/package.json

In short, we can do this by adding !in .gitignorethe file, as shown in the example above.