Ignoring undesired files in subversion

Romain — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:02:00 +0200

Good web development practices includes versionning your source code, to be able to rapidly track new appearing bugs and efficiently share work on same source code between more than one people (In fact i use it also for personnal projects, that only involves one developper).

Basic usage is pretty straightforward, and the Subversion Book (see related links) will get you started pretty fast (it took me about an afternoon to read the basic chapters, install subversion, set up svnserve not to give my code to anybody requesting it, installing trac (web interface/wiki/ticket/timeline frontend to svn) and learning the basics to import/checkout/update/revert/resolve stuff in a svn tree.

Recently, some new problem came to me, and I was glad to see that it was not a problem at all because of subversion properties. Properties are text values you set on a svn versionned folder that can have a special meaning. For example, svn:externals property allows you to use another project as a subpart of your tree, very handy in case of plugins, or dependencies for example.

But todays property that interests us is svn:ignore. Pretty self explaining, it allows you to ignore some files, or file patterns, when commiting your changes. Why? Imagine python development, where .pyc (python compiled) files arise everywhere you run .py (python source) files... Ignoring *.pyc would be usefull, don't you think? Ok, you do not write python, so what? Imagine a cache system... Or a website logs... The interest is the same, you'd like to simply ignore the cache, or log folder from svn status or svn commit, thoose folders are usefull but versionning them is very questionable, if not complete nonsense.

So here is how to proceed. The svn commands we're going to use are propset, propget, propedit and propget.

svn propset svn:ignore <mask> <dir> <path> svn propset svn:ignore <dir> <path>

Once set, you can simply propedit it, with your favorite text editor (set SVN_EDITOR, or EDITOR environment variable to the one you like):

svn propedit svn:ignore <path>

To look at the current value of the property:

svn propget svn:ignore <path>

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Ignoring undesired files in subversion