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
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Event Delegation with MooTools

    Events play a huge role in JavaScript. I can't name one website I've created in the past two years that hasn't used JavaScript event handling on some level. Ask yourself: how often do I inject elements into the DOM and not add an...

  • By
    Pure CSS Slide Up and Slide Down

    If I can avoid using JavaScript for element animations, I'm incredibly happy and driven to do so.  They're more efficient, don't require a JavaScript framework to manage steps, and they're more elegant.  One effect that is difficult to nail down with pure CSS is sliding up...

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!