Google App Engine App.yaml config for skip-files to ignore Mercurial files

Question

I have added a line at the top of skip_files to make app engine deployment skip all files starting with .hg such as the .hgignore file and the .hg directory. Will this ignore the whole .hg directory and all its files and subdirectories?

skip_files:
- ^(.*/)?\.hg*$
- ^(.*/)?app\.yaml
- ^(.*/)?app\.yml
- ^(.*/)?index\.yaml
- ^(.*/)?index\.yml
- ^(.*/)?#.*#
- ^(.*/)?.*~
- ^(.*/)?.*\.py[co]
- ^(.*/)?.*/RCS/.*
- ^(.*/)?\..*

Answer 1

By default unix style hidden files and folders are skipped. In other words, any file starting with a dot (.) is already skipped. That is what the last line in your list would do if it did not have the missing * at the end (I assume the \s are actually there).

Your suggestion of: ^(.*/)?.hg$ is not quite right. To match any file starting with .hg you need ^(.*/)?\.hg.*.

You should read about regular expressions.

edit: adding dump from appcfg.py update -v .

Scanning files on local disk.
2010-10-10 17:14:07,244 INFO appcfg.py:1693 Ignoring directory '.hg': Directory matches ignore regex. 
2010-10-10 17:14:07,244 INFO appcfg.py:1686 Ignoring file '.hgignore': File matches ignore regex.