Ignore everything but one file in .gitignore

Sometimes it's useful to ignore everything but one or two files in .gitignore.

For example, when using GatsbyJS and Netlify, redirects are placed in the public folder as _redirects. As the public folder also is used when building your Gatsby site, it's a good practice not to include it in version control. But then, how do we include the _redirects and nothing else?

All you need to do is to prepend ! to the file you don't want to have ignored in your .gitignore.

For our use-case above with the Netlify _redirects file, our .gitignore would look like this:

public/*
!public/_redirects