Git - Unignore a subfolder

Today I found somethings new to unignore a subfolder in git.

I have a git folder with this structure:

├── Personal
└── Work
    ├── project1
    │   ├── docs
    │   │   └── doc.md
    │   └── test.md
    └── project2
        └── test.md

and now, I want to unignore Work/project1/docs/ only. (every files and other subfolders in Work still be ignore). So, what should I do?

In .gitignore file, I tried some rules like that:

# 1
Work/
!Work/project1/docs/

# 2
Work/*
!Work/project1/docs/*
...

or swap those lines. But it doesn’t work.

After searching, I found 2 interesting things:

1. You have to “unignore” every parent directory of anything that you want to “unignore”: Ignore everything in this directory, but not some certain subdirectory.

Work/*
!Work/project1/

Work/project1/*
!Work/project1/docs/

1. The trailing /* is significant.

   • If you write Work/ in gitignore, git will understand that you want to:

     • Ignore Work folder itself
     • Ignore everything in Work folder.

     => If you write unignore rule below (eg: !Work/project1), git will do nothing, cause it never looks at Work folder, so it can not apply unignore rule to any subfolders

   • If you write Work/* in gitignore, git will understand that you want to:

     • Keep folder Work
     • Ignore everything in Work folder.

     => Git can apply unignore rule to subfolders cause I can look at Work - parent dir.

References

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/5534865/4381022