I think that first line was missing

.gitignore files don’t use /* PHP-style comments */

am I wrong?

Probably. Your change uses valid .gitignore syntax, but not in the way I imagine you intended:

1. the leading / refers to the directory separator, and
2. the * matches everything except /,

so adding this .gitignore would permit Git to ignore any file in the same directory whose name was a single character, but wouldn’t

Ignore everything in root directory for WordPress.gitignore

@LucasLarson Thanks for the feedback!

I was not trying to add a php style comment, but trying to ignore everything in the root directory, except (the other lines that have a ! in front of it)

This configuration (with the modification I added) works great on my windows machine with gitbash, but maybe my machine is a edge-case.

Without it, all the files of WordPress core are tracked with the repo. With it, only the plugin / theme files are tracked (which is what I was looking for in my case)

I don’t think this is production-ready yet.

.gitignore is already built to ignore or skip everything in a directory unless otherwise specified. Adding the /* line to an existing .gitignore does nothing to your repo unless you also run git rm -rf --cached: “The files/folder in your version control will not just delete themselves just because you added them to the .gitignore” and if they’re “already in the repository” then “you have to remove them” yourself (via Ahmad on StackOverflow).

If the user will already have to git rm -rf --cached, then there is no need to add this line, because those entries will already be skipped unless they’re in this .gitignore’s other rules.

.gitignore is already built to ignore or skip everything in a directory unless otherwise specified.

I'm on Git 2.23.0, and using this .gitignore without a /* at the beginning, in a freshly downloaded WordPress folder, after git init and before any commits, VS Code tells me there are 1,694 pending changes:

After adding /* (and !.gitignore), VS Code tells me there are 29 pending changes:

Also, gitignore's documentation says that with the !, "any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again", and their example at the end for excluding everything except a specific directory includes a /* at the top:

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