syncthing-stignore - Man Page

Prevent files from being synchronized to other nodes

Synopsis

.stignore

Description

If some files should not be synchronized to (or from) other devices, a file called .stignore can be created containing file patterns to ignore. The .stignore file must be placed in the root of the synced folder. The .stignore file itself will never be synced to other devices, although it can #include files that are synchronized between devices. All patterns are relative to the synced folder root. The contents of the .stignore file must be UTF-8 encoded.

NOTE:

Note that ignored files can block removal of an otherwise empty directory. See below for the (?d) prefix to allow deletion of ignored files.

Patterns

The .stignore file contains a list of file or path patterns. The first pattern that matches will decide the fate of a given file.

NOTE:

Escaped characters are not supported on Windows, where \ is the path separator. If you still need to match files that have square or curly brackets in their names, one possible workaround is to replace them with ?, which will then match any character. For example, you can type ?banana? to match both [banana] and {banana}, and so on.

NOTE:

Prefixes can be specified in any order (e.g. “(?d)(?i)”), but cannot be in a single pair of parentheses (not “(?di)”).

NOTE:

Include patterns (that begin with !) cause Syncthing to traverse the entire directory tree regardless of other ignore patterns. If the watcher is enabled, the entire directory tree will be watched as well.

Top-level include patterns are treated as special cases and will not force Syncthing to scan (or watch) the entire directory tree. For example: !/foo is a top-level include pattern, while !/foo/bar is not.

Example

Given a directory layout starting at the synced folder’s root:

.DS_Store
.stignore
foo
foofoo
bar/
    baz
    quux
    quuz
bar2/
    baz
    frobble
My Pictures/
    Img15.PNG

and an .stignore file with the contents:

(?d).DS_Store
!frobble
!quuz
foo
*2
qu*
(?i)my pictures

all files and directories called “foo”, ending in a “2” or starting with “qu” will be ignored. The end result becomes:

.DS_Store     # ignored, will be deleted if gets in the way of parent directory removal
foo           # ignored, matches "foo"
foofoo        # synced, does not match "foo" but would match "foo*" or "*foo"
bar/          # synced
    baz       # synced
    quux      # ignored, matches "qu*"
    quuz      # synced, matches "qu*" but is excluded by the preceding "!quuz"
bar2/         # synced, despite matching "*2" due to child frobble
    baz       # ignored, due to parent being ignored
    frobble   # synced, due to "!frobble"
My Pictures/  # ignored, matched case insensitive "(?i)my pictures" pattern
    Img15.PNG # ignored, due to parent being ignored
NOTE:

Please note that directory patterns ending with a slash some/directory/ matches the content of the directory, but not the directory itself. If you want the pattern to match the directory and its content, make sure it does not have a / at the end of the pattern.

New in version 1.19.0: Default patterns can be configured which will take effect when automatically accepting a folder from a remote device.  The GUI suggests same the patterns when adding a folder manually.  In either case, the .stignore file is created with these defaults if none is present yet.

Author

The Syncthing Authors

Referenced By

syncthing(1).

Aug 18, 2023 v1.23.7 Syncthing