git merge should ignore one directory

Question

I have tons of data in directory called reports. While doing git merge with another branch I am getting lots of conflicts for files under reports directory. I would like git merge to ignore files under reports.

In another words I would like all the data from reports from master and not from lab branch.

Is that possible?

This is what I am doing right now.

git checkout master
git merge lab

Answer 1

If you need those files versioned, but keeping only the version on master branch, you need a merge driver: see here for a keepMine script.

Each time you will merge lab to master, all files within the report directory will keep their content (the one versioned on master).