Mercurial ignore file

Question

I'm trying to get Mercurial to ignore a configuration file, but I'm failing to get it working.

I have created a repository on my server with hg init and cloned that repository to my computer. I then want to be able to edit the configurationj file but not commit those changes back to the server.

I have tried creating a .hgignore in the root of my clone, but Mercurial flags the file with a ? and whether I commit it or not it still continues to log my configuration changes.

Am I creating the .hgignore file in the wrong place, does this file need to be commited? Does it need to be created before I init the repository on the server?

Answer 1

• .hgignore does not need to be created before init
• It the config file will be used by others, you'd better commit the .hgignore so others dont have to create it, but this is not needed for mercurial to ignore your local files (see example)
• Yes .hgignore has to be in the root directory

Simple example.

Init the repo:

$ mkdir test  $ cd test  $ hg init  

Create a file

$ touch foo  $ hg st  ? foo  

Now create a .hgignore, in the root directory of your repo:

$ echo 'foo' > .hgignore  

foo is now ignored:

$ hg st  ? .hgignore  

Note that .hgignore does not need to be committed for this to work.

A bit more tricky

If both the config file and a .hgignore (ignoring the config file) are committed in the repo, then yes, the config file changes will be tracked (in other words, .hgignore will have no effect)

Creating config and commit it

$ touch config $ hg ci config -Am 'adding conf' 

Ignore it:

$ echo 'config' >> .hgignore 

Commit .hgignore:

$ hg ci .hgignore -Am '.hgignore' 

Then if you clone the repo:

$ cd .. $ hg clone test other-user $ cd other-user 

and modify config:

$ echo 'new config param' >> config 

then hg will show the changes:

$ hg st M config 

How to deal with this?

You probably want to have a main default configuration file, that is versioned, in the repository, global.cfg

And you will ask users to create a local.cfg where they will put their local settings. And your script will source the local.cfg if present: the local settings override the global ones. Of course, add a line to .hgignore to ignore local.cfg ;)

Alternative: no global config file, only a config.example that users copy and modify locally. The con here is that you will not keep track easily of changes between versions.

Answer 2

Even if you have ignored files, Mercurial will track them once they have been added to the repository.

To remove your config file from the repository, you can use

hg remove -Af file.cfg 

This will remove the file from from the repository (once committed) without deleting your local file. See hg help remove However, there is now a delete recorded in the repo, and Mercurial will remove that file when your or anyone else updates across that revision.

You could also rename it and have people copy the master to their local file, but you will need to coordinate updates of the local file.

hg rename file.cfg file.cfg.example