exclude directories from control mercurial

Question

I have my GWT project set up with hg for version control, and want to exclude the generated files in the war/modulename folder entirely.

I would prefer not to have to use an --exclude switch with every command. Is there a preferences file I can use to regularly exclude the directory?

Answer 1

Use .hgignore file. Basically, you can create a .hgignore file in the directory or repo

Please look at the following SO discussion. It answers most of what you need.

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2510044/mercurial-a-few-questions-all-related-to-hgignore
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34784/mercurial-hgignore-for-visual-studio-2008-projects
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1785609/would-like-to-create-some-defaults-for-my-hgignore-files-in-tortoisehg-mercurial
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3714820/mercurial-script-plugin-for-ignore-remove-binary-files
• http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hgignore.5.html
• http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/.hgignore

The two different syntax in .hgignore file are glob and regexp. The SO posts and link to Mercurial documentation should make that clear.

A typical file can contain both types of syntax.

# use glob syntax.
syntax: glob

*.elc
*.pyc
*~

# switch to regexp syntax.
syntax: regexp
^\.pc/

As an example, the following ignores the files created during merge

syntax:regexp

\.orig$
\.orig\..*$
\.chg\..*$
\.rej$
\.conflict\~$

Answer 2

To ignore a whole directory add the following to a .hgignore file in the root of your checkout:

war/modulename

If you just want a few files you could have a line something like so:

war/modulename/*.extension