How do you get git to ignore all contents of a directory?

Question

I have a git directory which contains the a whole bunch of files and then has a directory called 'sessions'. 'sessions' contains cookie information for my web.py program.

I need the folder 'sessions' to remain in the git repository because without the folder the program does not function correctly. I don't need the actual contents of folder being stored in the git directory.

So the question is:

How can I get git to ignore the contents of a folder but not the folder itself?

Answer 1

Add a sessions/.gitignore file with

* !.gitignore 

The second line tells git not to ignore the .gitignore file, so the folder is not empty but everything else is ignored.

Answer 2

If I'm remembering correctly, you can do this by creating a .gitignore file in the sessions folder with [^.]* as its contents.