Ignoring files & lines

Sometimes a clover: directive shouldn’t run, or a whole file or tree should stay untouched. Clover offers two mechanisms: ignore control comments for individual directives, blocks, and files, and .gitignore for pruning paths during the scan.

Ignore control comments

These are standalone clover: comments, not keys inside a directive, written in the host file’s comment syntax. Only the first token is matched, so a trailing explanation is fine (# clover:ignore-file generated, do not edit).

Ignore the next directive

clover:ignore suppresses the directive on the line immediately below it. Place it directly above the clover: comment you want to disable:

# clover:ignore
# clover: provider=github repository=ignored/one
x: 1
# clover: provider=github repository=kept/two
y: 2

Only ignored/one is skipped, and kept/two is processed as usual.

Ignore a block

clover:ignore-start and clover:ignore-end bracket a region, and every directive between them is suppressed:

# clover:ignore-start
# clover: provider=github repository=block/one
# clover: provider=github repository=block/two
# clover:ignore-end
# clover: provider=github repository=kept/three
z: 3

Ignore a whole file

clover:ignore-file drops the entire file from the scan, wherever it appears:

# clover:ignore-file

# clover: provider=github repository=whole/file
w: 4

clover:ignore vs disabled

The disabled key disables a single annotation from within the annotation itself. The ignore comments are separate controls that reach further than a per-annotation key can, covering a block, a whole file, or even entire trees with .gitignore.

.gitignore

During the walk Clover prunes any path your .gitignore files match, so generated output, vendored code, and build directories are never scanned. The matching follows git’s own rules: gitignore syntax, files applied from the repository root down to each directory, last match winning, and negation (!pattern) restoring a path. Files outside any repository are never ignored, and the VCS directories themselves (.git, .jj, .hg, .svn) are always skipped.

# .gitignore
ignored/

A directive in ignored/ is pruned, and a sibling outside it is scanned normally.

Overriding with --no-ignore

Pass --no-ignore to run, lint, or format to scan files that .gitignore would otherwise exclude. VCS directories (.git, .jj, .hg, .svn) stay excluded regardless, and the in-file clover:ignore controls still apply, since the flag only disables .gitignore pruning.

clover run --no-ignore

For excludes that live with the project config rather than in .gitignore, see paths.exclude.