ignorelib

Use the syntax and semantics of gitignore with custom ignore file names and locations

git has a comprehensive mechanism for selecting files to ignore inside repositories. ignorelib lets you use the same system, customized to your own needs.

You can read about the semantics of gitignore here: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

This library is a lightly-modified version of the gitignore implementation in dulwich, a pure Python implementation of git.

Installation

python -m pip install ignorelib

Usage

Setup

The primary entrypoint is the class factory method IgnoreFilterManager.build(), with the following inputs:

path: the root path (required). All path checks you make are relative to this path.
global_ignore_file_paths: an optional list of file paths to attempt to load global ignore patterns from.
- Relative paths are relative to the root path (for git, this would be .git/info/exclude)
- User expansion is performed, so paths like (for git) ~/.config/git/ignore work.
- Files that cannot be loaded are silently ignored, so you don't need to check if they exist or not.
- Files earlier in the list take precedence, and these files take precendence over the patterns in global_patterns.
global_patterns: an optional list of global ignore patterns. These are the things that should always be ignored (for git, this would be .git to exclude the repo directory)
ignore_file_name: an optional file name for the per-directory ignore file (for git, this would be .gitignore).
ignore_case: an optional boolean for specifying whether to ignore case, defaulting to false.

Use

You check if a given path is ignored with the is_ignored() method of an IgnoreFilterManager object, which takes a (relative) path and returns True if it matches an ignore pattern. It returns False if it is explicitly not ignored (using a pattern starting with !), or None if the file does not match any patterns. Note that this allows you to distinguish between the default state (not ignoring) and actually matching a pattern that prevents it from being ignored.

To iterate over not-ignored files, IgnoreFilterManager.walk() has the same interface as os.walk() but without taking a root path, as this comes from the the IgnoreFilterManager.

After using an IgnoreFilterManager instance to get a number of paths, you can extract the state (i.e., all loaded patterns with their sources) in a JSON-serializable format with the IgnoreFilterManager.to_dict() method.

Example

To replicate the behavior of git, you would do something like:

import os.path

import ignorelib

def get_filter_manager_for_path(path):
  return ignorelib.IgnoreFilterManager(path,
      global_ignore_file_paths=[
          os.path.join('.git', 'info', 'exclude'), # relative to input path, so within the repo
          os.path.expanduser(os.path.join('~', '.config', 'git', 'ignore')) # absolute
      ],
      global_patterns=['.git'],
      ignore_file_name='.gitignore')