Exclude files / folders from clean task

[johanneslamers]

I'm working on a large site with some extra folders in the root of the website (./public/) with client related stuff. When I build the site with gulp-starter the whole root folder gets cleaned (cleared). Is it possible to set an extra config param to exclude folders / files from the clean task?

[greypants]

Not a bad idea. That's sort of what I created the static task for, though it was more for things like favicons. You could put all of the persistent client stuff in assets/static, and it'd just get re-copied over to the root untouched every time.

Or nest your assets in public, so the root dest is something like 'public/assets', and the only the only thing that gets wiped out is that assets folder.

But I'm open to adding configuration as well. I feel like I started to add that at somepoint but hit some issues and never finished.

[fyllepo]

I'm certainly in favor of this feature... or instead of deleting the actual config.root.dest folder, perhaps adding config options for the clean task so its possible to negate certain folders...

I will try put something together shortly.

[1stevengrant]

yeah, especially when it wipes out index.php for your CMS :)

[greypants]

@stevieg83 you can get around that by change your root dest to something like assets, so only your assets folder gets wiped out by the clean task.

[1stevengrant]

good shout

[greypants]

We definitely need to address this. There's a couple of routes we could go, and maybe it's a combination of them:

1. We can add an exclude folders/files option like @johanneslamers suggested
2. Provide an include folders/files option (inverse of above)
3. We can also add an option to disable the "clean" step - but that'd create some problems if you're using file revisioning... new files would just keep piling up.

[elivz]

Yes please! I am working on switching over to Blendid from my homegrown build process, but I want to use a customized HTML task to copy my Craft templates to dist/craft/templates (so I can hard-code the revved asset filenames during build). That means I need to use dist as my dest folder...which means the clean task wipes out Craft every time. I would probably lean towards whitelisting rather than blacklisting, but either one would work for my purposes.

[greypants]

@elivz why do you need to hard-code the filenames? We included a Craft plugin to handle that automatically: https://github.com/vigetlabs/blendid/blob/master/extras/craft/ASSETS-README.md

[greypants]

@elivz

I would probably lean towards whitelisting rather than blacklisting, but either one would work for my purposes.

Good call, I think that's a probably a better approach.

[elivz]

Well, I guess I don't need to. But it's always seemed cleaner to me to handle all the revisioning in the build process and not have the extra plugin dependency. I already modified the rev task to replace the asset urls in my Twig templates (PR coming...), now I just need to find a way to move those template files outside of the webroot without "cleaning" my entire CMS installation every time.