SVN: Is there a way to mark a file as "do not commit"?

Subversion does not have a built-in "do not commit" / "ignore on commit" feature, as of February 2016 / version 1.9. This answer is a non-ideal command-line workaround

As the OP states, TortoiseSVN has a built in changelist, "ignore-on-commit", which is automatically excluded from commits. The command-line client does not have this, so you need to use multiple changelists to accomplish this same behavior (with caveats):

• one for work you want to commit [work]
• one for things you want to ignore [ignore-on-commit]

Since there's precedent with TortoiseSVN, I use "ignore-on-commit" in my examples for the files I don't want to commit. I'll use "work" for the files I do, but you could pick any name you wanted.

First, add all files to a changelist named "work". This must be run from the root of your working copy:

svn cl work . -R

This will add all files in the working copy recursively to the changelist named "work". There is a disadvantage to this - as new files are added to the working copy, you'll need to specifically add the new files or they won't be included. Second, if you have to run this again you'll then need to re-add all of your "ignore-on-commit" files again. Not ideal - you could start maintaining your own 'ignore' list in a file as others have done.

Then, for the files you want to exclude:

svn cl ignore-on-commit path\to\file-to-ignore

Because files can only be in one changelist, running this addition after your previous "work" add will remove the file you want to ignore from the "work" changelist and put it in the "ignore-on-commit" changelist.

When you're ready to commit your modified files you do wish to commit, you'd then simply add "--cl work" to your commit:

svn commit --cl work -m "message"

Here's what a simple example looks like on my machine:

D:\workspace\trunk>svn cl work . -R
Skipped '.'
Skipped 'src'
Skipped 'src\conf'
A [work] src\conf\db.properties
Skipped 'src\java'
Skipped 'src\java\com'
Skipped 'src\java\com\corp'
Skipped 'src\java\com\corp\sample'
A [work] src\java\com\corp\sample\Main.java
Skipped 'src\java\com\corp\sample\controller'
A [work] src\java\com\corp\sample\controller\Controller.java
Skipped 'src\java\com\corp\sample\model'
A [work] src\java\com\corp\sample\model\Model.java
Skipped 'src\java\com\corp\sample\view'
A [work] src\java\com\corp\sample\view\View.java
Skipped 'src\resource'
A [work] src\resource\icon.ico
Skipped 'src\test'

D:\workspace\trunk>svn cl ignore-on-commit src\conf\db.properties
D [work] src\conf\db.properties
A [ignore-on-commit] src\conf\db.properties

D:\workspace\trunk>svn status

--- Changelist 'work':
        src\java\com\corp\sample\Main.java
        src\java\com\corp\sample\controller\Controller.java
        src\java\com\corp\sample\model\Model.java
M       src\java\com\corp\sample\view\View.java
        src\resource\icon.ico

--- Changelist 'ignore-on-commit':
M       src\conf\db.properties

D:\workspace\trunk>svn commit --cl work -m "fixed refresh issue"
Sending        src\java\com\corp\sample\view\View.java
Transmitting file data .done
Committing transaction...
Committed revision 9.

An alternative would be to simply add every file you wish to commit to a 'work' changelist, and not even maintain an ignore list, but this is a lot of work, too. Really, the only simple, ideal solution is if/when this gets implemented in SVN itself. There's a longstanding issue about this in the Subversion issue tracker, SVN-2858, in the event this changes in the future.

I don't believe there is a way to ignore a file in the repository. We often run into this with web.config and other configuration files.

Although not perfect, the solution I most often see and use is to have .default file and an nant task to create local copies.

For example, in the repo is a file called web.config.default that has default values. Then create a nant task that will rename all the web.config.default files to web.config that can then be customized to local values. This task should be called when a new working copy is retrieved or a build is run.

You'll also need to ignore the web.config file that is created so that it isn't committed to the repository.

Check out changelists, which can provide you with an option to filter out files you have changed but do not want to commit. SVN will not automatically skip a file unless you tell it to - and the way you tell it that this file is somehow different to other files is to put it in a changelist.

It does require more work for you, and you can only apply the changelist to your working copy (obviously, imagine the chaos that could ensue if you could apply a 'never update' property to a revision!).

Conflicted files are not allowed to be committed. You can take advantage of this to keep your private changes out of the repository. This works best with a small number of files.

To get a conflict for a-file, your working copy (WC) does not have the up to date a-file from the repository, and that the a-file in your WC has changes that are in the same location as changes in the repository (changes that you didn't update to yet). If you don't want to wait for the conditions above you can create a conflict for a-file like this:
In working copy 1 (WC1), add a line of text to the top of a-file, such as "make a conflict here". Use the necessary syntax so that you don't break the repository. Commit a-file from WC1. In WC2, add a different line of text to the top of a-file, like "i want a conflict". Update from WC2, and now a-file should be in conflict.

I got tired of waiting for this to get built into SVN. I was using tortoiseSVN with ignore-on-commit, but that pops up a user dialog box that you can't suppress from the command line, and when I run my build script and go and make a cup of tea, I hate it when I come back to discover it's waiting for user input 10% of the way through.

So here's a windows powershell script that commits only files that aren't in a changelist:

# get list of changed files into targets
[XML]$svnStatus = svn st -q --xml C:\SourceCode\Monad
# select the nodes that aren't in a changelist
$fileList = $svnStatus.SelectNodes('/status/target/entry[wc-status/@item != "unversioned"]') | Foreach-Object {$_.path};
# create a temp file of targets
$fileListPath =  [IO.Path]::GetTempFileName();
$fileList | out-file $fileListPath -Encoding ASCII
# do the commit
svn commit --targets $fileListPath -m "Publish $version" --keep-changelists 
# remove the temp file
Remove-Item $filelistPath

This is late to the game, but I found the most awesome-est command line command for this problem. Done using bash. Enjoy.

svn status | grep -v excluding | sed 's/^A */"/g; s/$/"/g' | tr '\n' ' ' | xargs svn commit -m "My Message"

Ok, so here's an explanation of the command. Some things will need to be changed based on your use case.

svn status

I get a list of all the files. They'll all start with those status characters (?, !, A, etc). Each is on its own lines

grep -v excluding

I use grep to filter the list. It can either be used normally (to include) or with the -v flag (to exclude). In this case, it's being used to exclude, with a phrase "excluding" being what will be excluded.

sed 's/^. */"/g; s/$/"/g'

Now I remove the status character and whitespace at the beginning of each line, and then quote each line, using sed. Some of my filenames have spaces in them, hence the quoting.

tr '\n' ' '

Using tr, I replace all newlines with spaces. Now my entire list of files to commit is on one line.

xargs svn commit -m "My Message"

Lastly, I use xargs to execute my commit command with the message. It does the commit, and drops my quoted file list as the last argument.

The result is that everything ultimately works the way that I want it to. I still kind of hate svn for forcing me to jump through these goddamn hoops, but I can live with this. I guess.

A solution that does not ignore changes in directory properties

I tried to use the solution based on changelist, but I have a couple of issues with it. First my repository has thousand of files, so the changelist to be committed is huge, and my svn status output became way too long and needed to be parsed to be useful. Most important is that I wanted to commit changes that came from a merge, which means they include property changes. When committing a changelist, the svn properties attached to the directory are not committed, so I had to do an extra commit:

svn ci --cl work -m "this commits files from the work changelist only"
svn up
svn ci --depth empty DIR . -m "record merge properties"

You may have to do that for several directories (here I record the properties of DIR and of the current dir .), basically those with a M in the second column when issuing the svn status command.

Solution

I used patches and svn patch. In pseudo-code:

svn diff $IGNORE_FILES > MYPATCH   # get the mods to ignore
svn patch --reverse-diff MYPATCH   # remove the mods
svn ci -m "message"                # check-in files and directory properties
svn patch MYPATCH                  # re-apply the mods

Like other posters, I end up using a script to maintain the list of files to ignore:

#! /usr/bin/env bash

finish() {
    svn patch MYPATCH               # re-apply the mods
}
trap finish EXIT

IGNORE_FILES="\
sources/platform/ecmwf-cca-intel-mpi.xml \
runtime/classic/platform/ecmwf-cca.job.tmpl \
runtime/classic/platform/ecmwf-cca-intel.xml"

svn diff $IGNORE_FILES > MYPATCH # get the mods to ignore
svn patch --reverse-diff MYPATCH # remove the mods

svn "$@"

I typically used it with ci and revert -R ..

If you are on linux, below answer will be useful

Step 1 Create .svnignore file in root level of your working copy, and add folders/files in each new line(e.g, below)

\.
folder1
folder2
folder3/file2.html
folder4/file1.js

Note: You also need to add \. as that points to root directory

Tip: To get exact folder/file path, run svn st -u then copy and paste same path in .svnignore file

Step 2 Run below command to commit everything except folder/files from .svnignore file

svn ci -m "YOUR-COMMENT-HERE" $(svn st | grep -v -w -f .svnignore | awk '{print $NF}')

Command Explanation

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║ svn ci             ║ Shorthand for svn commit                                                                               ║
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║ svn st             ║ Shorthand for svn status                                                                               ║
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║ |                  ║ Pipe(|) is used to pass output of previous command to next command's input                             ║
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║ grep               ║ grep is a linux command to filter                                                                      ║
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║ grep -v            ║ Give result other than matched (Inverse)                                                               ║
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║ grep -w            ║ Exact match(used to match literal Dot(.))                                                              ║
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║ grep -f filename   ║ Read pattern from file                                                                                 ║
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║ awk '{print $NF}') ║ print last column data (columns are divided with space delimiter), used to get exact folder/file names ║
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svn:ignore is your answer.

Example:

$ svn propset svn:ignore -F .cvsignore .
property 'svn:ignore' set on '.'

svn propset "svn:ignore" "*.xml" .

the *.xml is the pattern of files to ignore; you can use directory names here as well.