Implement Dropbox .gitignore

user_4751901 0
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I use dropbox to store all my documents, including my programming projects. The only drawback there is to using it is the fact that it syncs all the useless dependencies. Unfortunately, there is no such things as a .dropboxignore file. Would it be possible to implement this functionality myself using the .gitignore file I already have? I want it to be completely automagical.

Thanks

dropbox git
3 Answers

There's a great article written by someone who was experiencing similar frustrations with dropbox as you are.

In the article, Peter describes two solutions:

  • DropboxIgnore - a small bash script which uses the Dropbox CLI to ignore files, only available for Linux.

  • .dbignore - a .gitignore-like solution, only available for mac OS

    • Note: This solution is no longer supported nor maintained

Please note that I have not used these products, nor do I have any affiliation with the developers.

user_20204760

This might be useful for others on Windows and Powershell with the git command line tool installed.

The script finds all .gitignore files in current folder and subfolder and sets the ignored files and folders to not upload to Dropbox.

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | `
Where-Object { $_.Name -eq '.gitignore' } | `
ForEach-Object { `
    Write-Host $_.DirectoryName; `
    Push-Location $_.DirectoryName; `
    git status --ignored --short | `
        Where-Object { $_.StartsWith('!! ') } | `
        ForEach-Object { `
            $ignore = $_.Split(' ')[1].Trim('/'); `
            Write-Host $ignore; `
            Set-Content -Path $ignore -Stream com.dropbox.ignored -Value 1 `
        }; `
    Pop-Location }

You can paste this into say dropbox-sync-ignore.ps1 and store in your PATH and run it whenever you start or update a project in git.

user_147633700

Dropbox allows you to ignore specific folders or files without excluding them, therefore, you could implement a script that will find files based on your .gitignore files and ignore them.

I recently implemented dropboxignore which is a simple shell script that creates .dropboxignore files based on existing .gitignore files in order to ignore the matched files from dropbox.

Note: dropboxignore is currently available only for Linux and MacOS.

user_67792520
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