SVN checkout ignore folder

Question

Can I ignore a folder on svn checkout? I need to ignore DOCs folder on checkout at my build server.

edit: Ignore externals isn't an option. I have some externals that I need.

Answer 1

You can't directly ignore folders on a checkout, but you can use sparse checkouts in svn 1.5. For example:

$ svn co http://subversion/project/trunk my_checkout --depth immediates 

This will check files and directories from your project trunk into 'my_checkout', but not recurse into those directories. Eg:

$ cd my_checkout && ls bar/ baz foo xyzzy/ 

Then to get the contents of 'bar' down:

$ cd bar && svn update --set-depth infinity 

Answer 2

Yes you can using SVN 1.6. You will need to do a checkout first then mark the folder for exclusion then delete the unwanted folder.

svn checkout http://www.example.com/project cd project svn update --set-depth=exclude docs rm -fr docs 

From now on any updates to the working copy won't repopulate the docs folder.

See http://blogs.collab.net/subversion/2009/03/sparse-directories-now-with-exclusion/ and http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html#sparse-directory-exclusion for more details.

Tom