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Forum Discussion
vladgasan
Dropbox Product Manager
Dropbox Product ManagerCut the Clutter: Ignore Files Feature is now live
Update: This feature is now live and available to all individual plan customers! Thank you to all our testers, and share your feedback with the team, we're still eager to hear from you!
For ye...
Dell_Dropbox Any idea when this will be available to a broader audience? I'm hesitant to write a watchdog utility to automatically ignore everything in my .gitignore files if this is slated for short release but this has been a frustrating limitation of dropbox for the better part of a decade.
Dell_Dropbox
Community Manager
Community Managerhuhlig This feature should now be available to all users who have the beta version of Dropbox installed. Also, please ensure you also have Early Access enabled, this is required to access the Ignore FIles feature.
- Go to your Dropbox account settings.
- Scroll to the Preferences section.
- Toggle Early Access to On
Dell_Dropbox So I enabled the early access feature, went to sync options, and clicked Modify the rules, which created the rules.dropboxignore file. I did this on both machines and added two rules as a test: one for a file and one for a folder. Both are regularly deleted and recreated whenever the IDE performs a complete build.
/Projects/**/Cargo.lock
/Projects/**/target/
I have a directory structure that looks something like this:
/<folders>/<files>
/Projects/<projectname>/src/*
/Projects/<projectname>/target/*
/Projects/<projectname>/Cargo.lock
/Projects/<projectname>/Cargo.toml
/Projects/<projectname>/<other files>
/Projects/<groupname>/<projectname>/src/*
/Projects/<groupname>/<projectname>/target/*
/Projects/<groupname>/<projectname>/Cargo.lock
/Projects/<groupname>/<projectname>/Cargo.toml
/Projects/<groupname>/<projectname>/<other files>Based on the rules above, I would assume the following would be ignored; however, they appear to be still synced every time I build, which creates 10s of thousands of files.
/Projects/<projectname>/target/*
/Projects/<projectname>/Cargo.lock
/Projects/<groupname>/<projectname>/target/*
/Projects/<groupname>/<projectname>/Cargo.lock- Dell_Dropbox
Pinging vladgasan for this one, maybe we can get a little help
vladgasanHi huhlig
The issue is with the leading slashes used in your paths. Our engineers landed a fix that supports leading slashes. It could take a few days for your Dropbox build to update and after that the existing path ignores should work.
If you don't want to wait, go ahead and remove leading slashes from your paths:
/Projects/**/Cargo.lock -> Projects/**/Cargo.lock
/<folders>/<files> -> <folders>/<files>
and so on
After that save the rule file and remove files that match the rule or wait for them to be recreated when your IDE performs a build. The rules should start working again after that!
Keep in mind that if files have synced to dropbox.com already you'll need to remove them manually from there since we currently don't have support for cleanup of files, that were uploaded to dropbox.com.
Let me know if this works or if you have any other questions!Im wondering, if a ignore generator can be built like https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/
The idea being that, users can automatically generate a rules-ignore file based on development tools/languages - so the most common, along with files dropbox things should/could be ignore i.e .DS_Store etc...
Maybe the community can even help provide a list of ignore etc... this is being at top level would ensure you dont sync any of these files etc..
