dropboxignore
The “Problem”
A common issue/request about Dropbox was about ignoring files without using Selective Sync. Dropbox recently introduced the ability to ignore specific files or folders. Although the significance of the new feature, many users [1,2,3,4] have expressed the importance of ignoring files from Dropbox using Glob just like .gitignore
. For various reasons Dropbox doesn’t seem to have the will to implement such a feature :/
The walk-around
As a result, I decided to implement dropboxignore which is a simple shell script that ignores files from Dropbox based on glob patterns. Additionally, existing .gitignore
files can be used to automatically generate .dropboxignore
files.
The main difference between dropboxignore and the other relevant projects:
- rozbb/DropboxIgnore
- swapagarwal/dropbox_ignore
- ridvanaltun/dropbox-ignore-anywhere
- MichalKarol/dropboxignore
- mweirauch/dropignore
is the fact that dropboxignore is implemented using shell and the minimum requirements (attr
package is the only requirement)
dropboxignore is currently available only for Mac and Linux and has various features:
- Ignore/Revert specific files
- Automatically update
.dropboxignore
- Revert all ignored files
- Updated
.dropboxignore
based on changes in.gitignore
file.
You can find more usage examples here
Things to not expect from dropboxignore
- Automatically ignore new matching files.
When a new file has been created and is matched by a .dropboxignore
file, user should re-ignore matching files. A cronjob could solve this drawback.
- Automatically detect deletions from
.gitignore
files
Current implementation can detect and update .dropboxignore
file if an extra pattern has been added in the corresponding .gitignores
but it can not handle deletions in the same way.