Rsync and exclusions

 

an old post found back on disqr about rsync (original date : circa 2016)

You might want to use the rsync exclude options directly in your script either by specifying a file with all the exclusions to perform, or by specifying them in the command line directly :

--exclude-from <file-name with 1 pattern by line>
--exclude <file or="" dir="">

For example :

rsync -r -a -v -e "ssh -l Username" \

        --exclude 'dbconfig.xml' --exclude 'WEB-INF/classes/' --delete \

        /local/Directory remote.server:/remoteDirectory

One important thing to keep in mind when excluding a directory is that rsync will always consider the path to be relative to the source directory.

This can be used for example when you want to push your production from a Production JIRA instance to a Staging JIRA instance, but your dbconfig.xml is different (different DB auth parameters for example), and hence want to avoid some files.