How to ignore files directories in TFS for avoiding them to go to central source repository

Question

Is it possible to set up files folders to ignore on a per-project basis in TFS source control   For example  I ve a website with an assets folder that I do not want to go in to source control  These assets are maintained by a separate system  Also  I don t want to put several gigabytes of assets into source control  but I need a couple of samples on my dev machine  but I don t want to check those in either   If I m working on this website while bound to source control and I refresh the tree  these files will automatically get added again  I want to prevent this from happening

User · Answer

I found the perfect way to Ignore files in TFS like SVN does.
First of all, select the file that you want to ignore (e.g. the Web.config).
Now go to the menu tab and select:

File Source control > Advanced > Exclude web.config from source control

... and boom; your file is permanently excluded from source control.

User · Answer

For TFS 2013  Start in VisualStudio-Team Explorer  in the PendingChanges Dialog undo the Changes whith the state  add   which should be ignored  Visual Studio will detect the Add s  again  Click On  quot Detected  x add s  quot -in Excluded Changes In the opened  quot Promote Cadidate Changes quot -Dialog You can easy exclude Files and Folders with the Contextmenu  Options are   Ignore this item Ignore by extension Ignore by file name Ignore by ffolder  yes ffolder  TFS 2013 Update 4 Visual Studio 2013 Premium Update 4   Don t forget to Check In the changed  tfignore-File  For VS 2015 2017  The same procedure  In the  quot Excluded Changes Tab quot  in TeamExplorer Pending Changes click on Detected  xxx add s   The  quot Promote Candidate Changes quot  Dialog opens  and on the entries you can Right-Click for the Contextmenu  Typo is fixed now  -

User · Answer

If you re using local workspaces  TFS 2012   you can now use the  tfignore file to exclude local folders and files from being checked in   If you add that file to source control you can ensure others on your team share the same exclusion settings   Full details on MSDN - http   msdn microsoft com en-us library ms245454 aspx tfignore  For the lazy      You can configure which kinds of files are ignored by placing a text   file called  tfignore in the folder where you want rules to apply  The   effects of the  tfignore file are recursive  However  you can create    tfignore files in sub-folders to override the effects of a  tfignore   file in a parent folder       The following rules apply to a  tfignore file            begins a comment line    The   and   wildcards are supported    A filespec is recursive unless prefixed by the   character      negates a filespec  files that match the pattern are not ignored       Example file     Ignore  cpp files in the ProjA sub-folder and all its subfolders ProjA   cpp      Ignore  txt files in this folder     txt     Ignore  xml files in this folder and all its sub-folders   xml     Ignore all files in the Temp sub-folder  Temp     Do not ignore  dll files in this folder nor in any of its sub-folders    dll

User · Answer

I m going to assume you are using Web Site Projects   These automatically crawl their project directory and throw everything into source control   There s no way to stop them   However  don t despair   Web Application Projects don t exhibit this strange and rather unexpected  imho  moronic  behavior  WAP is an addon on for VS2005 and comes direct with VS2008     As an alternative to changing your projects to WAP  you might consider moving the Assets folder out of Source control and into a TFS Document Library   Only do this IF the project itself doesn t directly use the assets files

User · Answer

For VS2015 and VS2017 Works with TFS  on-prem  or VSO  Visual Studio Online - the Azure-hosted offering  The NuGet documentation provides instructions on how to accomplish this and I just followed them successfully for Visual Studio 2015  amp  Visual Studio 2017 against VSTS  Azure-hosted TFS   Everything is fully updated as of Nov 2016 Aug 2018  I recommend you follow NuGet s instructions but just to recap what I did   Make sure your packages folder is not committed to TFS  If it is  get it out of there  Everything else we create below goes into the same folder that your  sln file exists in unless otherwise specified  NuGet s instructions aren t completely clear on this   Create a  nuget folder  You can use Windows Explorer to name it  nuget  for it to successfully save as  nuget  it automatically removes the last period  but directly trying to name it  nuget may not work  you may get an error or it may change the name  depending on your version of Windows   Or name the directory nuget  and open the parent directory in command line prompt  type  ren nuget  nuget Inside of that folder  create a NuGet config file and add the following contents and save it   NuGet config   lt  xml version  quot 1 0 quot  encoding  quot utf-8 quot   gt   lt configuration gt       lt solution gt           lt add key  quot disableSourceControlIntegration quot  value  quot true quot    gt       lt  solution gt   lt  configuration gt    Go back in your  sln s folder and create a new text file and name it  tfignore  if using Windows Explorer  use the same trick as above and name it  tfignore   Put the following content into that file    tfignore    Ignore the NuGet packages folder in the root of the repository    If needed  prefix  packages  with additional folder names if it s    not in the same folder as  tfignore  packages    include package target files which may be required for msbuild    again prefixing the folder name as needed   packages   targets   Save all of this  commit it to TFS  then close  amp  re-open Visual Studio and the Team Explorer should no longer identify the packages folder as a pending check-in  Copy pasted via Windows Explorer the  tfignore file and  nuget folder to all of my various solutions and committed them and I no longer have the packages folder trying to sneak into my source control repo   Further Customization While not mine  I have found this  tfignore template by sirkirby to be handy  The example in my answer covers the Nuget packages folder but this template includes some other things as well as provides additional examples that can be useful if you wish to customize this further

User · Answer

It does seem a little cumbersome to ignore files  and folders  in Team Foundation Server  I ve found a couple ways to do this  using TFS   Team Explorer   Visual Studio 2008   These methods work with the web site ASP project type  too   One way is to add a new or existing item to a project  e g  right click on project  Add Existing Item or drag and drop from Windows explorer into the solution explorer   let TFS process the file s  or folder  then undo pending changes on the item s   TFS will unmark them as having a pending add change  and the files will sit quietly in the project and stay out of TFS   Another way is with the Add Items to Folder command of Source Control Explorer  This launches a small wizard  and on one of the steps you can select items to exclude  although  I think you have to add at least one item to TFS with this method for the wizard to let you continue    You can even add a forbidden patterns check-in policy  under Team -  Team Project Settings -  Source Control    -  Check-in Policy  to disallow other people on the team from mistakenly checking in certain assets

[tfs] How to ignore files/directories in TFS for avoiding them to go to central source repository?

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