Adding a directory to subversion, and ignoring the directory contents

By Joaquin Lippincott, CEO, November 25, 2008

Sometimes when committing things to svn you want to commit a directory, but ignore all of the files inside it. The /sites/default/files/ directory within Drupal is a perfect example. Here's how:

Add the directory, while ignoring all of the files it contains:
svn add -N [directory]
After adding the directory enter the directory and run the following command:
svn propset svn:ignore '*.*' .
Commit your changes:
svn commit -m "Added the directory and set the files within it to be ignored"

All better now...!

Comments

Besnique

Mon, 06/21/2010 - 16:43

Hi there, Would you happen to

Hi there,

Would you happen to know how to svn add a directory that contains blank spaces in its title? For example:

svn add User accounts

where 'User accounts' is the directory title.

Many thanks and kind regards,

Besnique

Conor

Fri, 01/13/2012 - 14:20

thanks

this is exactly what i was looking for, thanks

Ari

Mon, 03/26/2012 - 23:06

You can also use --depth=empty

This didn't work for me. I ended up using:
svn add dirname --depth=empty

rooby

Wed, 06/13/2012 - 05:13

This doesn't cover sub

This doesn't cover sub directories inside the directory. For that you need svn propset svn:ignore '*' .

Hamed

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 14:27

Filter some files when using svn add

Hi,

If I want to add a directory while this directory contains differet types of files and I want to add some special type of files how should I use add?
For example if a directory has two types of files such as .txt and .bin and I want add just onlt .txt files

loved.by.Jesus

Fri, 10/30/2015 - 15:36

Best answer is from the SVN manual

svn add --depth=empty otherdir

see: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.6/svn.ref.svn.c.add.html

Anonymous

Sun, 02/21/2016 - 04:18

Not the same thing

This command prevents adding files in subfolder when performing an add, but it is temporary. You could also use:
svn add -N otherdir
But using svn:ignore is a "permanent" solution (until svn:ignore property is removed), which is less error-prone in large repositories, since add is recursive by default.

pumbo

Tue, 03/15/2016 - 03:32

Didn't work for me. To ignore

Didn't work for me. To ignore directories I had to use
> svn propset svn:ignore '*' .

Note '*' instead of '*.*'

Anonymous

Fri, 04/01/2016 - 15:26

pumbo is right

pumbo is right, this only ignores all files inside the directory and with an extension.
It doesn't cover the cases:
- subdirectories and all the files inside these
- files without extensions

To ignore literrally everything, you need to do:
> svn propset svn:ignore '*' .