Ripgrep: Configure ripgrep to search in a certain gitignored directory

[hiqsol]

What version of ripgrep are you using?

ripgrep 0.8.1 (rev c8e9f25b85)
-SIMD -AVX

How did you install ripgrep?

Ubuntu deb package.

What operating system are you using ripgrep on?

Ubuntu 16.04.3

Describe your question, feature request, or bug.

I have vendor directory ignored in .gitignore.
I want ripgrep to search in ./vendor directory in all of my projects but not in vendor directories deeper in the tree.
I've found a working solution with .ignore file with single line !/vendor.
But I would prefer to have it configured globally (e.g. in .ripgreprc) and not per project basis.

I tried -g vendor option and --ignore-file ~/myglobal.ignore with no success.

Could you please give me idea how to achieve such behavior.

[BurntSushi]

--ignore-file cannot work because it's specifically designed to have low precedence. It takes effect after "project specific" files are applied. That is, when there are two competing ignore rules, the one that is more local to the project wins. --ignore-file is indeed a "global" sets of rules, so it is always overridden.

Using -g unfortunately isn't going to get you anywhere either. Namely, -g vendor specifies a whitelist, which implies everything you search must match the whitelist. If you look at the --debug output of ripgrep, you'll see that with -g vendor, your vendor directory will get whitelisted, but since the files inside that directory (and any other files) don't match -g vendor, they are excluded from search.

You could use -g vendor -g 'vendor/**', but that will _only_ search the files in your vendor directory, which I'm assuming doesn't achieve what you want (and would be done more simply as rg pattern vendor).

So the only solution available to you is a project specific .ignore file. Moreover, I argue that this is in fact the only suitable solution in general. Even if ripgrep provided a different kind of global ignore file that overruled project specific settings, it wouldn't be able to enforce your rule in general because your rule is specifically expressed relative to some other directory (whether it's your CWD or a project root or whatever). Therefore, a .ignore (or .rgignore) is the right answer.

[BurntSushi]

Here is a somewhat idiosyncratic combination of glob flags that might strictly satisfy your question, but almost certainly screws something else up (like not respecting the rest of your .gitignore):

$ rg -g '*' -g '!.*' -g '!*/**/vendor' <pattern>

[hiqsol]

Many thanks for such detailed explanation!
I'll stick to .ignore.

[fcying]

you can use --no-ignore and set your own exclude in ripgreprc.

[BurntSushi]

@fcying That doesn't make any sense to me. Could you please elaborate?

[elquimista]

@BurntSushi @fcying's comment worked perfectly for my case. The folder node_modules is usually gitignored, but I sometimes need to search inside installed module folder when I'm deeply involved in debugging.

I tried the following and didn't work:

rg -g 'node_modules/<package_name>/**/*.js' '<pattern>'

And adding --no-ignore did the magic:

rg --no-ignore -g 'node_modules/<package_name>/**/*.js' '<pattern>'

[BurntSushi]

@elquimista This is over-complicating it. I'd definitely recommend reading the guide's section on automatic filtering.

Firstly, you can use -u instead of --no-ignore, where -u is a convenient synonym for telling ripgrep to disable handling of ignore rules.

Secondly, if node_modules is ignored, then specifying the node_modules directory itself will always override that. That is, if you do rg foo some-file and some-file is in your .gitignore, then ripgrep won't ignore because you explicitly told ripgrep to search it. So your command should be able to be reduced to just this:

$ rg '<pattern>' node_modules/<package_name> -tjs

[dustinfreeman]

I'm currently working in a large git repo with some tracked files in the index whose pattern is also gitignored. In my situation, I was trying to use ripgrep to search the content of these files but they didn't appear because I did not know they were gitignored.

I believe this is a not-uncommon circumstance: in general a pattern is gitignored, but the repo has a few files that needed to be explicitly added.

I know this is perhaps wishful thinking, but it would be wonderful if rip grep's automatic filtering was clever enough to include files tracked in the git index, even if their pattern is in the .gitignore.