Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

Permanently Ignoring Unwanted Files and Directories

When you create a new repository, chances are that over time it will grow to contain files that ought to not be managed by Mercurial, and which you don’t want to see listed every time you run hg status. For instance, “build products” are files that are created as part of a build but that should not be managed by a revision control system. The most common build products are output files produced by software tools such as compilers. As another example, many text editors litter a directory with lock files, temporary working files, and backup files, which it also makes no sense to manage.

To have Mercurial permanently ignore such files, create a file named .hgignore in the root of your repository. You should hg add this file so that it gets tracked with the rest of your repository contents, since your collaborators will probably find it useful too.

By default, the .hgignore file should contain a list of regular expressions, one per line. Empty lines are skipped. Most people prefer to describe the files they want to ignore using the glob syntax that we described above, so a typical .hgignore file will start with this directive:

syntax: glob

This tells Mercurial to interpret the lines that follow as glob patterns, not regular expressions.

Here is a typical-looking .hgignore file.

syntax: glob # This line is a comment, and will be skipped. # Empty lines are skipped too. # Backup files left behind by the Emacs editor. *~ # Lock files used by ...