Theprogrammersfirst: How to use .gitignore to ignore everything in a directory except one file?

2021-08-27

I've found several purported solutions to this problem here on SO, but for some unknown reason none of them work for me.

I need to ignore everything in a given folder except for one particular file. Easy, right? Not so fast.

I've tried most every suggested answer for each of these questions:

...but I'm no further along than when I started.

Here's the path to the file to include:

D:\Projects\Website\Website\bin\Settings.json

The repo is at:

D:\Projects\Website

My .gitignore file was generated by Visual Studio, so it contains this entry:

[Bb]in/

According to many of the answers to the questions above, I should be able to do something like this:

!/Website/[Bb]in/Settings.json

...but that doesn't work. The file is still ignored.

None of these permutations do the trick:

!*/Settings.json
!**/Settings.json
![Bb]in/Settings.json
![Bb]in/**/Settings.json
![Ww]ebsite/[Bb]in/Settings.json

I've also tried putting a separate .gitignore file in bin:

# Don't block Settings.json
!Settings.json
!.gitignore

No luck.

How can I block everything in [Bb]in except for the Settings.json file?

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