.gitkeep
isn’t documented, because it’s not a feature of Git
.
Git
cannot add a completely empty directory. People who want to track empty directories in Git
have created the convention of putting files called .gitkeep
in these directories. The file could be called anything; Git
assigns no special significance to this name.
There is a competing convention of adding a .gitignore
file to the empty directories to get them tracked, but some people see this as confusing since the goal is to keep the empty directories, not ignore them; .gitignore
is also used to list files that should be ignored by Git
when looking for untracked files.