What is a .GITKEEP file?
A .GITKEEP file is a special kind of file used by people who work with Git, which is a system that helps programmers save and manage different versions of their projects. The main purpose of a .GITKEEP file is pretty simple: it's used to make sure a folder gets included in a Git project even if there's nothing else in that folder. Normally, if a folder is empty, Git doesn't pay attention to it and doesn't include it in the project's saved versions. But sometimes, you want to keep that empty folder around for later use, and that's where a .GITKEEP file comes in handy.
To do this, you just create an empty file named .GITKEEP and put it inside the folder you want to keep. Even though this file doesn't officially do anything (it's not part of the official tools that come with Git), it's a trick that a lot of Git users follow. It's like saying, "Hey Git, please don't forget about this folder even though it's empty right now." The name ".gitkeep" is kind of a clever nod to another Git feature called ".gitignore." While ".gitignore" is an official feature that tells Git to ignore certain files and not save them in the project's versions, ".gitkeep" does the opposite by ensuring an empty folder gets noticed.
To work with a .GITKEEP file, you really just need Git, the version control system. Since .GITKEEP files are not about the content but about keeping the folder, you don't need a specific program to open them. Any basic text editor can open a .GITKEEP file if you really want to look inside, but usually, there's nothing to see because the file is empty. The important part is just having the file there, so Git knows to keep the folder in the project.
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