.hgignore not working for mercurial

Question

I use mercurial for php projects and my .hgignore file is not working. It's supposed to be placed in the .hg/ folder, isn't it?

.hgignore

/.hg/.hgignore file

# Allow *. syntax
syntax:glob

# Ignore these files
.hgignore
.htaccess
.hg/*

Nacred

Answer 1

There is no mention in the .hgignore page of that file being inside .hg:

The .hgignore file sits in the working directory, next to the .hg folder.

And whatever file you want to ignore, you must be sure they are not already tracked. If they are, you need to remove them first, and then add them as private (non-tracked) file.

Fasciate

aha yes! i supposed to make "Remove From Repository" for the files defined in .hgignore! just did it, and now it is fine! working well :) thanks – Nacred

To untrack a file without actually deleting it, hg forget <filename> is your friend! – Larner

Answer 2

Just from memory I think .hgignore needs to live in the repository root. You certainly don't need to tell it to ignore the .hg folder, that will happen more or less automatically. Any reason why you don't want your ignore and access settings in your repo?

Ampereturn

memory? i restarted mamp and mercurial... still same problem :/ i'm editing .htaccess file and mercurial is just taking the changes :/ ps, sorry but i didnt understand your question – Nacred

Johannes Rudolph is correct. The .hgignore should go in your repository root, not in your .hg directory. Any files you've already added override .hgignore. Files can't be both tracked and ignored, and if tracked it overrides the ignoring. He's also correct that .hg doesn't need to be in the .hgignore file -- that's automatic. – Callao

artmania: Mercurial stores these setting in .hgignore and .htacsess respectively. If you put them on the ignore list they won't be tracked by mercurial if they weren't added before. – Ampereturn

@Ry4an: You're correct, feel free to edit my answer and add that important part. – Ampereturn