You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Status:
Investigating
Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync
Please please please can you add a feature that allows folders to be excluded from the Dropbox account (on windows and mac). For sure I'm not the first person to request this, but I'm yet to find a g...
I joined this thread years ago. I've also used the various concocted solutions, ie.
-Stream com.dropbox.ignored, and whatnot. And yep, they don't work. Not as a long term fix.
And I admit, if Dropbox had the gitignore solution, it would have been nice, it would have solved our specific use case. And the feature would have made sense, as a nice to have.
Recently though, I came to a different conclusion.
It's not a Dropbox problem.
It's an NPM problem. Or an OS problem, depending how you look at it. We can't sync millions of files in split seconds, and taking the node_modules outside of our projects, isn't an easy task, nor would it even work, given the peer dependency problem. Dropbox though didn't create that problem.
If one of the other cloud providers had implemented the gitignore, maybe Dropbox would have had jumped on the request, years, and years, ago. They didn't. Nor did Google Drive. Nor did OneDrive.
In the time being, pulling from CDNs instead of using NPM has been my solution.