How to git ignore subfolders / subdirectories?

Question

I have a lot of projects in my .Net solution. I would like to exclude all "bin/Debug" and "bin/Release" folders (and their contents), but still include the "bin" folder itself and any dll's contained therein.

.gitignore with "bin/" ignores "Debug" and "Release" folders, but also any dll's contained in the "bin" folder.

bin/Debug or bin/Release in the .gitignore file does not exclude the directories unless I fully qualify the ignore pattern as Solution/Project/bin/Debug - which I don't want to do as I will need to include this full pattern for each project in my solution, as well as add it for any new projects added.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Have you tried wildcards?

Solution/*/bin/Debug Solution/*/bin/Release 

With version 1.8.2 of git, you can also use the ** wildcard to match any level of subdirectories:

**/bin/Debug/ **/bin/Release/ 

Answer 2

You can use .gitignore in the top level to ignore all directories in the project with the same name. For example:

Debug/ Release/ 

This should update immediately so it's visible when you do git status. Ensure that these directories are not already added to git, as that will override the ignores.