Pushing Empty Directories in Git

A while back some of my tests started failing for no reason. It seemed that one of my empty directories didn't exist. The file explorer in the GitHub UI even showed this. Git doesn't push empty directories to your repository. However, there are ways to get past this.

Adding a .gitignore

One apparent solution might be to just create a .gitignore with the following content:

.gitignore

This didn't seem to work, because Git again recognized that the directory is empty.

Adding a .keep

What I did was I added a .keep file in that directory. This made sure that the directory is pushed to Git. Unfortunately, that did make my tests fail, because that file wasn't expected.

The solution was to remove all .keep files before starting the test and readding them after the test.

Hooks in Tests

To remove and readd .keep files there is usually some system or way to define hooks inside a test. In QUnit (the testing framework I was using), it is:

QUnit.module('test group', {
  before() {
    // Stuff before this test group runs
  },
 
  after() {
    // Stuff after this test group runs
  },
 
  // ...
});