SVN: Ignore some directories recursively

Question

I don\'t want any directory named build or dist to go into my SVN no matter how deep in the tree it is.

Is this possible? In git I just put

Answer 1

As of subversion 1.8, there is now the svn:global-ignores property which works like svn:ignore but recursively (so set this on your top-level directory)

Answer 2

This works for me:

 svn propset --recursive svn:ignore *.zip <dir_tree_with_no_zips>

Answer 3

In order to ignore all such files in all repositories, you could add a global-ignores to your per-user configuration file.

On Unix-like systems, this area appears as a directory named .subversion in the user's home directory. On Win32 systems, Subversion creates a folder named Subversion, typically inside the Application Data area of the user's profile directory

See Configuration Options

Unfortunately, there's no per-repository option to do this. It's basically per-user, or per-directory, so the multiple svn:ignores is probably the way to go, as annoying as it can be.

Answer 4

svn propset takes --recursive as an option, so you can do this, with two downsides:

1. you have to check out the entire repository (or at least all directories therein), and
2. you have to remember to set the svn:ignore property whenever you add a new directory

Answer 5

For example the folder structure:

Project/
Project/dist/

cd Project
svn propset svn:ignore '*' dist/
svn ci -m "content of dist ignored"

It's good to do a svn delete of dist content before the ignore command, so for branches dist will be empty.

Worked for me, tested today. Here is the page explaining it a bit

Answer 6

You first have to move to the top folder of your working copy and create a file there (say .svnignore) where you should place all the patterns that you want to be ignored, for example (for an Android project):

bin
gen
proguard
.classpath
.project
local.properties
Thumbs.db
*.apk
*.ap_
*.class
*.dex

Then you run the following command (remember that you must be at the top folder of your working copy):

svn propset svn:ignore -R -F .svnignore .

This will only work for folders and files that are not yet under version control. If you want a folder (or file) that is being versioned to start being ignored as well, remove it from version control by running the command:

svn rm --keep-local <path>

Got all this from this great article that explains it all: http://superchlorine.com/2013/08/getting-svn-to-ignore-files-and-directories/