#Dropbox for mac syncing how to#
#Dropbox for mac syncing software#
#Dropbox for mac syncing windows#

Past 2 years have really showed me that I didn’t need to exclude ALL vendor or node_modules folders in my projects as most of them were not changing often enough to even matter. Some people might consider it a downside but obviously setting it like the new approach you have to manually mark excluded file/s or folder/s from syncing. Not a big deal but something to keep in mind as traditional git ignore has a file that it checks but Dropbox approach is based on actual file attributes. One thing to keep in mind is that if you recreate the folder you have to re-set the Dropbox ignore attribute so it won’t sync. This approach however is not perfect but it’s close. Unlike my previous solution to this problem, this one doesn’t require you to replicate the files, use a 3rd party program in between your files and dropbox and works actually pretty well. If you set the flag on a file/folder inside the dropbox folder that’s actively sync-ed, it will remove it from the cloud (as if you deleted it). The good part is that the attribute you set can be set outside the Dropbox folder and when the file/folder is moved to Dropbox folder the app will sync and see the attribute and will put a small (ignored icon right next to it - see image). If you un-ignore it, it will treat normally as any other folder/file.

The way it works is that if you ignore the file/s or folder/s when you set the flag Dropbox will ignore it completely from syncing.

#Dropbox for mac syncing windows#

The feature works on Mac, Windows and Linux but the purpose of this guide is not to just highlight the feature but to show how I automated my workflow on OSX. To revert to normal syncing you would run this command: attr -r filename/folder Basically, you find the located the file/s or folder/s you want to ignore from syncing and run the command: xattr -w 1 filename/folder

#Dropbox for mac syncing how to#

You can read about the ignore feature here How to set a Dropbox file to be ignored. Well, two years have passed and Dropbox finally introduced an ignore feature on folders and files via setting file and folder attributes xattr making me rethink my approach to a much more git-like way of ignoring folders I don’t want sync-ed. Even though it wasn’t a massive problem as I would do this only once on the target machine, it was still annoying. You can see that this can be annoying, hunting down the places where I needed to run composer and npm again to generate the files that were excluded from sync.

#Dropbox for mac syncing software#

Positives were that it was working with any cloud syncing service such as Dropbox or Google Drive as it was relying on GoodSync software (some people used rSync to achieve similar goal), but on the other hand one of the flaws in my approach, aside from duplicating the files, was that some node_module and vendor folders were ignored even though they shouldn’t have been, leading to somewhat problematic ‘rebuild’ process on the new computer via npm or composer as any vendor or node_modules folders would be excluded in your project.

My solution has served me pretty well for a couple of years and it wasn’t without flaws however. You can read the “dirty” approach to this problem in my previous post here ( Solving painful syncing of node_modules when using Dropbox or Google Drive). The main issue was the amount of files that needed to be synced for common folders like node_modules (npm) and vendor (composer) that would take forever as these folders might have dependencies of dependencies and they can contain 10s of thousands of files. I’ve written in 2018 about this problem and the pain it was to use Dropbox to keep your files and development sync-ed between multiple computers while using Dropbox to keep the files in the cloud.

Dropbox ignore - solving ignoring node_modules and other folders from syncing (on a mac) The Problem