We work with SVN every day, but not every aspect of it. Some of the more commonly forgotten SVN features I always have to look up are ignore and externals – although they’re both pretty much the same to use. Here’s my preferred approach though – it enables you to use your favorite editor (vi, nano, etc etc etc). I prefer nano, but I’ve listed vi as well below.
Set your editor:
export SVN_EDITOR=nano or export SVN_EDITOR=vi
Move to the correct directory:
svn propedit svn:externals . or svn propedit svn:ignore .
The next part is easy, just enter the name of the local directory followed by the externals path, like so:
externals-folder http://myothersite.com/my-other-project/externals-folder/
And run svn up.
Or, if you’re doing svn ignore, same thing, but just the name of the folder or files to ignore.
file_to_ignore.ext folder-to-ignore
Again, just run svn up.
Don’t forget though – these are not recursive, so if the directory you want to ignore is in /public/web/, then make sure to cd /public/web/ first. I hope that makes sense.