Exclude/Ignore a folder in Visual Studio 2015 (Web Project)

Question

I have a web project in Visual Studio 2015, and a few folders in it that I need, but don't really want being pulled into Visual Studio; These are your normal folders, node_modules,bower_components, etc. Nothing fancy about them.

However I cannot find a way to "ignore" or "exclude" them. In the past, I could right click a folder and simply tell it to exclude it, and it worked; But since upgrading to VS2015, that option seems completely gone.

I thought perhaps it was in the .gitignore, but tampered with that to no avail. Is there some new secret to this?

Answer 1

I've spent quite some time looking around for how to make NPM and bower work smooth with a website-project - and the main problem is that the node_modules-folder is so deeply nested. Causes all kinds of path-too-long-issues. This is with visual studio 2015 - website project created with older Visual Studio.

If the Visual Studio project type is "web application", and you have a .project-file for your web project, you should be able to right click files/folders in the solution explorer, and select "exclude".

However, if your Visual Studio project type is "website", there is no .project-file - you cannot exclude files and folders from Visual Studio. The trick is to set the hidden-attribute on files or folders with windows explorer - Visual Studio will then ignore them. Don't try to set hidden recursive on all subfolders - just the "outer" folder is fine.

This worked fine for me for node_modules. NPM-integration and command line NPM still works. I also removed the read-only-attribute from the folder.

If possible, consider converting your project to web application.

Read more here:

Other stack-overflow issue about website-type projects

About web application project vs. website project

About excluding items

Answer 2

After installing ASP.NET 5 Beta 8, right click on the folder in Visual Studio, and select "Hide from Solution Explorer".

The relevant files for upgrading to Beta 8 are either DotNetVersionManager-x64.msi or DotNetVersionManager-x86.msi (depending on what your system supports), and WebToolsExtensionsVS14.msi.