Mercurial ignore file

by
  • .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.

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