Ability to specify files/directories to look at and ignore everything else

[olegantonyan]

Situation:
A big old project written without any specific style. It's impossible to integrate Rubocop to the whole project. But, it's possible to enable it for new code only and incrementally add new directories as we go.

What I want to do:
Add global .rubocop.yml to the project and specify directories to look at. Everything else should be ignored. We're going to add more directories to that list as we go, but we need to start with a small step.

Right now the only way to do this looks very ugly and unreadable:

Exclude:
    - !ruby/regexp /^((?!(something|some\/other\/dir)).)*$/

I bet everyone will give up on this after a 10 directories added.

My first try was this:

Include:
    - 'something/**/*.rb'
Exclude:
  - '**/*'

I.e. exclude everything, but include these.

Second try was:

Include:
    - 'something/**/*.rb'

Ok, just include these, and I'm not telling you to include anything else, so why do you even look at ./*?

I'm not sure how syntax should look like, but I hope the problem was clear. Any thoughts appretiated

[Drenmi]

Welcome over from StackOverflow land. 🙂 Will have a look at the existing code and give this a think over the weekend. Any input from others is appreciated. 😊

[jonas054]

The best way to do this currently is to build up a list of AllCops: Exclude patterns. They can be regexp or glob patterns, and you don't have to cram everything into a single pattern.

The alternative is that you build a wrapper script that finds the files to inspect (using the version control history for example) and gives them as command line arguments to rubocop.

[gettalong]

I would also prefer to specify what to include instead of excluding all the things I don't want. A typical Ruby project has bin, lib and test/spec folders. So a config like

AllCops:
  Include:
    - bin/**/*
    - lib/**/*.rb
    - test/**/*.rb

would allow one to use Rubocop easily. No temporary Ruby files would raise a false alarm.

Would it be possible to add a new config option to AllCops to specify the exclude/include order? The default could be the current "find all files, exclude those from exclude list, use ones that are Ruby files, use ones that are specially included", with the alternative being "find all files, only use the ones from the include list, exclude the ones from the exclude list".

[revolter]

I thought that the default Include is **/* and as soon as you set it to my_folder/**/*, it overwrites the default "all folders and files" setting, so it would only look in the files inside the my_folder.

[revolter]

So, what is the solution to this closed issue?!

[olegantonyan]

I've added all existing files in the project to Exclude. It's very long list, but it seems to work just fine. Any new file created since then will be inspected by rubocop. And when refactoring old code we usually remove the file from the rubocop's exceptions.

[revolter]

That's not an elegant solution at all :( Couldn't there be a DisableImplicitIncludes option instead?

[jonas054]

Yes, I guess so. Opening again.

Either we add a DisableImplicitIncludes option, or we add an IncludeOnly option. It would be nil or empty by default, and if it contained any files or patterns, the implicit includes and the Include option would be disregarded.

Either way, the Exclude option could still work as today, I think.

[revolter]

I, too, think that the Exclude option should not be modified.

IncludeOnly sounds like the best way to achieve this, because that's exactly what I expected when first started using it: only run against the specified files in the Include option.

[chuckd]

Just got bitten by this - took 10 minutes of reading to work out why rubocop went from inspecting 950 files to only 5. We had an explicit Include list (and an Exclude list, if that is relevant). Was only listed as a New Feature, could it be listed as a Change with a warning?

Adding - '**/*.rb' to the Include: seemed to fix it, although I'm not 100% sure this was the only hardcoded path before.

[nunosilva800]

Same here!

BTW - @chuckd full list here: https://github.com/jonas054/rubocop/blob/e64d9419b9e053cd26ec2919ad69caa6d973725d/config/default.yml#L17

In my case, I simply removed the AllCops/Include rule in rubocop.yml

[chuckd]

Aha, thanks @Onumis - I'd missed *.rake.

[joshuapinter]

I got burned by this, too. Just noticed our rubocop tests were only doing 40 or so files instead of 1000+.

Just to be clear, was this a change in functionality between one of the releases? If so, which one?

I could have sworn that adding entries to the Include would append to the existing list, not overwrite the existing list.

Thanks!

[bbatsov]

I think we changed this in 0.56 or 0.57.

I could have sworn that adding entries to the Include would append to the existing list, not overwrite the existing list.

True. The problem was that this way there was no way to modify the hardcoded defaults, which was frustrating for some people. Now people have the ultimate flexibility, as nothing's hardcoded anymore.

[joshuapinter]

Thanks for the clarification. So, quick question, how does one go about adding a specific file, whilst keeping the default files included?

[bbatsov]

See leklund@6c7e5ed

Probably we should make this more prominent in the docs.

[gresbtim]

what happened to IncludeOnly?

we have a huge codebase and want to enable it step by step for small parts of the codebase (mainly new written things or things we touched)

config looks

AllCops:
  IncludeOnly:
    - 'app/models/building_data/*'

however this gives me a warning: Warning: AllCops does not support IncludeOnly parameter.

[jonas054]

IncludeOnly was never added, but if you override AllCops:Include locally it will do what you want.