Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Mercurial: Global .hgignore

By  on  

I've worked with git for several years and one of my favorite git posts is Create a Global .gitignore which details how you can create a global .gitignore file to ignore certain useless files (think .DS_Store, node_modules, etc.) so that you aren't always adding the same files to every repository's .gitignore file and don't get presented with a bunch of garbage when running git status.

The team I've been shifted to at Mozilla uses Mercurial instead of git, so you can imagine I'm trying to shake off the git mindset so I can become a Mercurial master.  With that said, a trick like a global .gitignore is philosophy-independent and just a good help.  The first step is opening your profile's .hgrc file and adding the following under the [ui] section:

[ui]
ignore = ~/.hgignore

The above points to the location of a global .hgignore file.  Now open your .hgignore file and add files and directories which you never want added to any repositories:

.DS_Store
.orig
node_modules/

Global .*ignore files take a moment to configure and keep paying back by preventing noise and unwanted files in commits.  Take the time and enjoy the rewards!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Mark S

    That’s a really useful trick! However, isn’t it most effective when working on projects by yourself? If I understand correctly it means that you wouldn’t be committing the details of the files to ignore so if someone else contributed to the project who hadn’t also configured their global ignores they could end up committing a load of junk files…

    • Mark S

      Of course you mentioned that in the linked article on doing the same in git which I only read _after_ posting my first comment ;)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!