Excluding Files from Diffs


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Say you have a bunch of minified JavaScript in your repository, or maybe just a file that has constant churn that you just don’t honestly care about. The thing is, the diffs are always huge, and make viewing the diff of changesets kind of useless. Here’s how to tell Kiln to just ignore those in diff views?

Simply check in a file called .kilnignore in the root of your repository, using exactly the same syntax as a .hgignore file. Any files you specify there will be ignored when Kiln renders diffs. But don’t worry: they’ll be version tracked and stored just like any other file. You’ll only be changing how they’re shown in Kiln. So if you later change your mind, just remove the banned file from your .kilnignore file, and it’ll show up in diffs again, just as if nothing has changed.

So for example, let’s say that my IDE makes solution files called LotsOChurn.solution, that I want to ignore. I also want to ignore all of my minified JavaScript, which I always make sure ends with the extension .min.js. In that case, to tell Kiln to ignore those files, I’d just put the following in my .kilnignore:

syntax:glob
LotsOChurn.solution
*.min.js

and they’ll disappear from within Kiln.