svnignore is a command-line utility to simplify working with svn ignore lists.

When your source code repository is configured with neat ignore lists, svn status should display only the files that have changed, or new files that you have added. All the build files and execution artefacts will be ignored. This makes it very easy to see which changes you have made, but more importantly, it makes it much simpler to see which files should belong to the repository, but don't.

If you're like me, you often forget to add a new file to the repository, and only realise this omission when trying to build the code on another machine. With ignore lists, when you run 'svn status', you see exactly what has been modified or added.

Of course, if you've made lots of changes, you might still miss a line starting with a ?. Here svnignore is very useful also: calling 'svnignore' without options shows all the files that are unknown - neither part of the repository nor ignored.

As a rule of thumb, I try to have no unknown files in my repository at all. Any unknown files are either added to the repository, if they're important (svn add FILE), or ignored (svnignore -a FILE).

At the moment svnignore still has to be built from the source. It's not a very complicated source, consisting as it does of a single file! The reason the source file is so small is that it utilizes a number of other libraries, which makes the work really easy:

You will need the following libraries to build svnignore

I installed libsubversion on my Ubuntu box with 'sudo apt-get libsvn-dev'. We need the development version since we will be building against it.

SvnCpp is a c++ wrapping around the subversion libraries. It is actually a sub-section of the RapidSvn code, so if you're particularly enthusiastic, you can checkout RapidSvn and find the svncpp directory, and build that separately from there. (For some reason, this is what I had to do under Ubuntu 9.04, but it could well have been an obscurity of my box.) Under Ubuntu 9.10, I used 'sudo apt-get install libsvncpp-dev'. Again, the dev package is required since we are building against it.

To build the full system from subversion, you will need to checkout the repository:

Note that you need the auto-tools when building from the repository. I've also left some files out (that automake will add), since it seems silly to put them into the repository if automake can provide them.

This is the guidance for installing on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard, though it should work on any other as well).

apr

I guess you can download and install apr from sources. If you're using MacPorts, you can probably also use 'sudo port install apr'.

svn

Does svn come with OSX? If not, you should be able to install it from source. Sorry, both apr and svn are just on my system, so I'm not too sure how they got there, or if I installed / built them at some point.

svncpp

A build / port of libsvncpp doesn't exist for Mac, and isn't available in MacPorts. However, it's quite possible to build the parts of it that we require:

After you've install libsvncpp using the instructions under DEPENDENCIES above, you will need to tell the svnignore configure script where the svncpp include files are. I unpacked my rapidsvn to /opt/src/rapidsvn-0.12.0-1, so the configure command I used with svnignore was

A warning here: you need to specify the include directory as an absolute path. Don't use ../src/rapidsvn-0.12.0-1/include, for instance - the build won't work.
(The configure script can find the svncpp library since we have installed it when we did the 'sudo make install' in the src/svncpp directory of rapidsvn.)

After this:

and svnignore will (hopefully) be working on your Mac.

Once installed, you can use svnignore from the command line by typing 'svnignore'.

svnignore performs one of five functions:

• listing unknown files in a repository (no option command),
• adding files to the list of ignored files in a repository (-a command),
• list ignored files in a repository directory (-l command) ^(*)
• editing the list of ignored files in a repository directory (-e command) ^(*)
• show svnignore help

^(*) these last two functions are actually just a wrapper around 'svn propget svn:ignore' and 'svn propedit svn:ignore' respectively.

By default, svnignore will list all unknown files in a repository, recursing through the repository directory. Each file is listed on a separate line preceded by a question mark, as though part of an 'svn status' command.

When listing files, svnignore supports the following options:

-d,--dir [DIRECTORY]

svnignore works with the repository in the given DIRECTORY. Without this option, svnignore works from the current working directory.

-N,--no-recurse

svnignore only shows unknown files in the current directory, and does not recurse into subdirectories.

-q,--quiet

Each file is printed on a separate line without a preceding question mark.

When adding ignored files, use the -a or --add command line options. Adding ignore files supports two modes: 'pattern' mode and 'default' mode.

The pattern mode is used by listing the file patterns to ignore. For example:

Will add test.output and test.log to the ignore list.

You can also use patterns:

Note that the pattern mode doesn't add the pattern to the ignore list, but it adds everything that matches the pattern right now. In other words, if in future a new file called future_file.log is added to the directory, it will be unknown, not ignored, until you add it to the ignore list itself.

In default adding mode, all the listed unknown files are added to the svn:ignore list. This can make life easy, but be sure you're not adding something that you didn't mean to. To use the default mode, simply provide no patterns:

Whe adding files to be ignored, svnignore supports the following options:

-d,--dir [DIRECTORY]

svnignore works with the repository in the given DIRECTORY. Without this option, svnignore works from the current working directory.

-N,--no-recurse

svnignore only adds unknown files in the current directory, and does not recurse into subdirectories. This option is ignored if patterns were provided.

-q,--quiet

svnignore prints no output.

To list all the files that are ignored in a particular directory, use:

The list command can take the -d [DIRECTORY] option as described under 4.1.1

Note that the list command is just a wrapper around the svn command line option: svn propget svn:ignore

To edit the list of files that are ignored in a particular directory, use:

The edit command can take the -d [DIRECTORY] option as described under 4.1.1

Note that the edit command is just a wrapper around the svn command line option: svn propedit svn:ignore. It therefore requires the same environment variables set that svn requires.

To view the help for svnignore use the -?, --help option:

See the AUTHORS file in the distribution.