Using Fossil Settings

<title>Fossil Settings</title>

<h1>Using Fossil Settings</h1>

Settings control the behaviour of fossil. They are set with the
<tt>fossil settings</tt> command, or through the web interface in
the Settings page in the Admin section.

For a list of all settings, view the Settings page, or type
<tt>fossil help settings</tt> from the command line.


<h2 id="repo">1.0 Repository settings</h2>

Settings are set on a per-repository basis. When you clone a repository,
a subset of settings are copied to your local repository.

If you make a change to a setting on your local repository, it is not
synced back to the server when you <tt>push</tt> or <tt>sync</tt>. If
you make a change on the server, you need to manually make the change on
all repositories which are cloned from this repository.

You can also set a setting globally on your local machine. The value
will be used for all repositories cloned to your machine, unless
overridden explicitly in a particular repository. Global settings can be
set by using the <tt>-global</tt> option on the <tt>fossil settings</tt>
command.

<h2 id="versionable">2.0 "Versionable" settings</h2>

Most of the settings control the behaviour of fossil on your local
machine, largely acting to reflect your preference on how you want to
use Fossil, how you communicate with the server, or options for hosting
a repository on the web.

However, for historical reasons, some settings affect how you work with
versioned files. These are <tt>clean-glob</tt>, <tt>binary-glob</tt>,
<tt>crlf-glob</tt> (and its alias <tt>crnl-glob</tt>), <tt>empty-dirs</tt>,
<tt>encoding-glob</tt>, <tt>ignore-glob</tt>, <tt>keep-glob</tt>,
<tt>manifest</tt>, and <tt>mimetypes</tt>. The most important is
<tt>ignore-glob</tt> which specifies which files should be ignored when
looking for unmanaged files with the <tt>extras</tt> command.

Because these options can change over time, and the inconvenience of
replicating changes, these settings are "versionable". As well as being
able to be set using the <tt>settings</tt> command or the web interface,
you can create versioned files in the <tt>.fossil-settings</tt>
subdirectory of the check-out root, named with the setting name.
Each file holds the value of a setting, and these files are checked in,
committed, merged, and so on, as with any other file.

Where a setting is a list of values, such as <tt>ignore-glob</tt>, you
can use a newline as a separator as well as a comma.

For example, to set the list of ignored files, create a
<tt>.fossil-settings/ignore-glob</tt> file where each line contains a
glob for ignored files.

If you set the value of a setting using the <tt>settings</tt> command as
well as a versioned file, the versioned setting will take precedence. A
warning will be displayed.