[Solved] Force tracking of hidden files (.dot files)

I'm wondering if there's a way to get collab to track hidden files. I have some of my own files for meta purposes, which start with ".", so they're hidden in unity and not processed as assets. I need to have these checked into collab though as they're very much part of the project state. Is there some way to tell collab I want it to track non asset files? Sort of an opposite .collabignore maybe?

 

Hi @jacknoid, with Collaborate 1.6 we were dependent on Unity's Asset Library to notify us of changes/additions/etc that we should be tracking. That's why we couldn't see hidden files since Unity couldn't see them.

With our 2.0 preview package, we're able to go around Unity to see all folders and assets in the project's root directory. We added a new rule in our .collabignore file for 2.0 that excludes hidden files so that the rules behave like Collaborate 1.6 but you can easily remove that line to allow Collaborate to track them. Just open the ignore file in your root directory and delete the following rule under #Unity generated:
.*/

 

Great, thanks!

 

@ryanc-unity is there any estimate on when the preview package will be stable? and also can we use negation operator to exclude certain files rather than removing all .*?

Edit: I just downloaded the preview package and still can't see the dotfiles without collabignore rule!

 

Hi @hyphenbash, the preview package will be replaced with the new version of Collaborate that we are currently working on. To reduce the amount of time spent developing this new design we are not doing additional development work on the v2.0 package outside of fixing critical, high user pain bugs like crashes, freezes and work lost. We are aiming to have a rough version of the new Collaborate available to users closer to the end of August.

The .collabignore file does allow negation operators. For example, if you have a folder among your Assets called TestMaterials that you'd like to exclude, but a sub-folder called FinalMaterials that you'd still like to include, then you can use the following rules to ignore everything that's in the TestMaterials folder but still push what's in the FinalMaterials folder:

Assets/TestMaterials/*
!Assets/TestMaterials/FinalMaterials

Did you try restarting the Editor after downloading the preview package? And you made sure to comment out or delete the ".*/" rule in the .collabignore file (not in collabignore.txt) and saving those changes? And did you press the Rescan button in the Collab Toolbar after saving those changes?

 

Hey @ryanc-unity
I seem to run into the same issue. The asset tool "Digger" uses an `.internal` folder and it fails to sync with Unity Collab.

You mentioned that late August 2019 there would be a new release, however the latest release is still April 2019. So I instead upgraded the Unity Collaborate package to 2.0.0 preview.17.

Looking into the `.collabignore` file, I can't find a dotfile rule like .*, but changes are still not picked up by collaborate (even after pressing rescan).
Please advice how to proceed and what is the status about the Unity Collab update?

 

Does this go for folders with a ~ after them as well? I have a handful of data that updates regularly and every time it does unity wants to update it. Turning off auto update isnt helpful because I still end up having to wait for this process eventually. Making slight changes causes unity to update the files which is a pain because it is many files and ends up taking 1-2 min for a minor change. Unity doesnt need to know what is going on in these folders so they should be hidden (which would boost productivity), but other scripts require them so they need to exist and need to be shared over collab. I want to be able to sync this data with collab when I initiate a push but since unity cant detect dot folders and folders with ~ at the end collab isnt picking these folders up either.

 

This is also the same for folders with ~ at the end. If Unity cannot see the folders then Collaborate cannot either. But if you have assets that are constantly being changed that you don't want to include with your Publishes, then you could try using a Partial Publish instead. You can right-click over the edited assets that you'd actually like to Publish, then by clicking on Collaborate/Publish, only those selected assets will be listed in the Collaborate Toolbar. From there, you can Partial Publish only those changes instead of all of them.