Using Fossil Settings

Settings control the behaviour of fossil. They are set with the fossil settings 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 fossil help settings from the command line.

Repository settings

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 push or sync. 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 -global option on the fossil settings command.

"Versionable" settings

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 allow-symlinks, binary-glob, crlf-glob, crnl-glob, empty-dirs, encoding-glob, ignore-glob, keep-glob and manifest. The most important is ignore-glob which specifies which files should be ignored when looking for unmanaged files with the extras 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 settings command or the web interface, you can create versioned files in the .fossil-settings subdirectory of the check-out root, named with the setting name. The contents of the file is the value of the 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 ignore-glob, you can use a newline as a separator as well as a comma.

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

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