How to tell to GIT, it should take care of only these and these sub-folders?

Question

I want to use git in a particular development environment. MetaTrader 4.

The structure of development directory is fixed, it is of this type:

MQL4
  Expert
  Files
  imagery
  Include
  Indicators

Some directories come by default with sample files. My idea would be to create directories under of these directories , and to indicate in .gitignore, I wish that only these directories have to be considered by git.

MQL4
  Expert
    MyGITExperts
  Files
  imagery
  Include
    MyGITInclude
  Indicators
    MyGITIndicators

My idea is a right one ? Are there a better one? How to tell to git, it should take care of only these and these sub-folders ?

Answer 1

Yes there is a way.

From git docs Example to exclude everything except a specific directory foo/bar (note the /* - without the slash, the wildcard would also exclude everything within foo/bar):

$ cat .gitignore
# exclude everything except directory foo/bar
/*
!/foo
/foo/*
!/foo/bar

http://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

In your case im assuming that MQL4 is inside your project root(where .git file is there)

/*
!/MQL4
/MQL4/*
!/MQL4/Expert/MyGITExperts
!/MQL4/Files
!/MQL4/imagery
!/MQL4/Include/MyGITInclude
!/MQL4/Indicators/MyGITIndicators

This is generally a bad idea when you have large number of such folders