Whitelisting gitignore, instead of the default blacklisting.

.gitignore

# ignore all root items, not recursively
/*

# whitelist dirs
!docs
!example_data
!requirements
!src
!tests

# whitelist files
!.env.dist
!.gitattributes
!.gitconfig
!.gitignore
!.pre-commit-config.yaml
!MANIFEST.in
!pyproject.toml
!README.md
!Requirements.md
!setup.py
!tox.ini

# recursively blacklist these (in case they pop up in a whitelisted folder)
__pycache__
*.egg-info
*.pyc