How to add .hgignore to my Mercurial folder?

Question

I'm learning to use Mercurial, and its learning curve is pretty straightforward. But one of my problem is, I can't add the .hgignore file to Mercurial folder. Windows (7) does not allow me to do this, and when I run the command

hg add .hgignore

, it returns error:

the system cannot find the specified file.

How can I create/add this file?

Answer 1

Execute

touch .hgignore

or

echo "" > .hgignore

in the needed directory

Answer 2

You don't need to add it to Mercurial directory. You should place .hgignore to repository's root directory.

The Mercurial system uses a file called .hgignore in the root directory of a repository to control its behavior when it searches for files that it is not currently tracking

You also can set up global .hgignore files:

In addition, a Mercurial configuration file can reference a set of per-user or global ignore files. See the hgrc(5) man page for details of how to configure these files. Look for the "ignore" entry in the "ui" section.

And there you can see instructions to define ignore file in mercurial.ini (or hgrc) file:

ignore A file to read per-user ignore patterns from. This file should be in the same format as a repository-wide .hgignore file. This option supports hook syntax, so if you want to specify multiple ignore files, you can do so by setting something like ignore.other = ~/.hgignore2. For details of the ignore file format, see the hgignore(5) man page.

Answer 3

Create it from the command line

echo syntax: glob > .hgignore