Ignoring Files and Directories in Subversion (SVN)

Subversion allows you to remove specified directories and files from revision control, such as temporary files or logs that would quickly become a real pain if you had to commit and update them like regular source files.

There are various ways to do this with global settings for file types or on a per directory basis.

I have run into a problem several times, checking in projects that have been started outside of SVN. If I import the entire directory tree into SVN, then check out a copy, all the directories are already under revision control and I need a way to remove them from it. There are 3 ways to handle this.

1: Delete the specific directories before you import the project into SVN.
This might be fine for tmp or log directories where all the contents are 'disposable' but this may not work in other situations like Rails doc directories where you have added a custom Readme file, for example.
When you check out the project, create those directories by hand and then use svn:ignore to tell svn to ignore them.

# mkir tmp
# svn propset svn:ignore 'tmp' .
# svn commit -m 'Ignore tmp directory'

2: Use svn propset to ignore the contents of particular directories.
To ignore the contents of a tmp directory, but not the directory itself, you could do this in a checked out copy of the project.

# svn propset svn:ignore '*' tmp
# svn commit -m 'Setting svn:ignore on contents of tmp'
# svn update

Now when you modify a file in tmp and then run svn status you should see no changes.
You can also use this to ignore certain types of files, such as gzipped files in the current directory:

# svn propset svn:ignore '*.gz' .

Follow this with a commit and update.
But note that this will NOT ignore any .gz files that existed prior to issuing the svn:ignore as these were already under revision control. You can use svn rm to get rid of these from the repository.

3. Remove the directory from the repository then recreate with the svn:ignore property.

# svn export tmp tmp1
# svn rm tmp
# svn commit -m 'remove tmp directory from repository'
# mv tmp1 tmp
# svn propset svn:ignore 'tmp' .
# svn commit -m 'ignore local directory tmp'


More information can be found in Chapter 7 of the SVN book