Clean flag for builds

[WalkerCodeRanger]

I know in this question on stack overflow one of the brunch contributors suggested using rm -rf public/ through npm scripts as the answer for the equivalent of a clean command. I really don't think that is a good answer. A tool like brunch should really support doing clean builds. Three options I can think of (in order from worst to best):

• Production build should always do a clean and build, since production is the time it really matters if you have extra junk files.
• Add a --clean flag to build
• Since the output directory should only contain the output of the build, just delete any files that don't match the current output

The last seems to fit best with the brunch approach and would fit well with watch. So for example, I could rename an asset and brunch watch would copy the new asset over and realize that the old asset name was no longer part of the output and delete it.

[es128]

There are people who depend on Brunch NOT doing this. But feel free to submit a PR that adds it as an option behind the --clean CLI switch as in your second suggestion (should work for both watch and build, regardless of environment).

[paulmillr]

I'm kinda reluctant to this. More flags, more complication.

What is your exact use case? Why not just use rm -rf? Because in my apps we're doing something different except for removing the files like every time.

For example, packing the result with Cordova. Or similar.

[WalkerCodeRanger]

I'm not familiar enough with Cordova to understand why cleaning would be a problem with it. I would think most workflows would want extra files (like old assets etc) in the public directory cleaned up to prevent them from being deployed. I guess if brunch was being used as part of a larger build process with grunt/gulp/etc that was putting other files into public/ you might not want those deleted, even then, I would think you would want them rebuilt.

I'm a .NET developer who was considering switching an AngularJS project that someone else setup for me using yeoman and grunt to brunch. Within the first 5 minutes of using brunch, I realized it wasn't cleaning up files and didn't have an option for doing this. I found this when I had messed up my config and was outputting my js file to the wrong location. After fixing the config, I found the old js file hadn't been cleaned up. This can also happen when renaming or removing assets etc. I think most build tools have some support for either a clean build or for cleaning up extraneous files since it is a common issue when building. Indeed the Gruntfile.js setup for me by yeoman does that as the first step of a build.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I thought it would be pretty obvious to have some kind of clean support. All the tools brunch is compared to do.

[paulmillr]

Thanks for the detailed answer.

On the implementation side, we'll need to also track the full list of files in public directory and map each output to input.

[es128]

Other tools have this as a necessary evil for when they can't make their workflows work without temp files. That's the main reason it's always a step for grunt anyway.

So Brunch hasn't needed it. But I think it would be ok to add the option.

In addition to a CLI switch it could be a config option to just cause it to happen every time without thinking about it if a project chooses.

[olegskl]

+1 Cleaning up public should really be the default option set to true.

[es128]

@olegskl as mentioned that would be a potentially dangerous breaking change for projects that deliberately bring other files into their public dir by other means/processes. If the option is added it to the pre-2.0 Brunch it would have to default to false.

[Bartmax]

I'm the OP of the related SO question and I'm not a big fan of the proposed solution.

Another option will be to create a brunch.output file like

{
  javascripts: ['file1.js', 'file2.js']
  styles: ['style.css', 'other.css']
  assets: ['font.ttf', 'image.png']
}

then imagine i update the config so now file1.js and file2.js became app.js
then brunch can compare the arrays and delete file1.js and file2.js and replaces the output file with

{
  javascripts: ['app.js']
  styles: ['style.css', 'other.css']
  assets: ['font.ttf', 'image.png']
}

in config, you can have a new option clean that supports brunch-files(default) | all | none | [values]
clean: brunch-files will removes any diff from output files.
clean: all will delete everything from public folder.
clean: ['javascripts'] which will only remove diff script files.
clean: none won't delete anything.

if there's no brunch-output file then no delete will happen

this can be added as default because it will not affect current projects because it only touches brunch generated files.

I don't know if it's worth having another file brunch-output, just suggesting another solution to discuss.

side-effect bonus: this brunch-output will also serve as a debugging tool, you get to clearly see which files were created by brunch.
side-effect bonus 2: you can have a brunch clean command that removes any file listed on brunch-output on public directory.

[pikeas]

+1 for clean flag/config setting!

[jugimaster]

+1 for a cleanup step. The config setting seems like a good idea.

I can't help but wonder why isn't this a feature already. Has no one thought of removing source maps for production builds?! That's what led me to this issue, and I'm just scraping together my first ever Brunch config here!

[dustinrjo]

+1 for the flag.
+2 for not doing it by default. I too have apps that combine brunch compiled files with other files output from other tools into the same directory.