Symbolic link handling during publish

[Mike B]

I currently have a site that previews and builds flawlessly but fails when being published. In the directory that the site is published to I have a large number of symbolic links that all point back to the same php file. During the publish Hypercontent deletes the php file and then produces file not found errors on the symlinks that look like:

There was an error attempting to preview or publish /itforumresponse.html; The requested file was not found: /itforumresponse.html

There was an error attempting to preview or publish /itforumresponse.html
Recorded Exception:
edu.columbia.filesystem.FileSystemException: The requested file was not found: /itforumresponse.html

Is there a way to prevent Hypercontent from trying to delete preexisting files that are in the target publish directory?

Thanks,
Mike

[Alex Vigdor]

Mike,
The ignore-directory element in the project configuration file can be used to tell hypercontent to ignore pre-existing content in specific target directories.  The downside is that HyperContent will not then delete files you have previously published form HyperContent and subsequently deleted under that directory, so it's usually advisable to try and isolate other content to specific subdirectories.  But you could set it to "/" to disable deletes altogether on publish.

Alex

[Mike B]

Thanks for your help. I'll segregate the preexisting data from the data managed by hypercontent.

[Mike B]

For the benefit of other HC users:

Be careful when using sym links in a folder designated for publication. HC will follow these sym links and try to delete files that don't belong with the project.