clean should not remove .git metadata

[msoulier]

I am deploying my pelican-generated site via heroku, so the target directory is a git repository. make clean deletes everything at the output directory, so I had to hack up my makefile to stop that behaviour.

[amanjeev]

@msoulier Can you share your solution please (or point me to the source)?

[rupert]

@amanjeev

clean:
    find $(OUTPUTDIR) -mindepth 1 -name '.git*' -prune -o -delete

This will also exclude .gitignore, .gitconfig etc.

[justinmayer]

@rupert: In my testing, those parameters to find preserves the .git directory itself but nukes everything inside it.

[rupert]

Ah sorry, I've updated the find command above.

$ find output
output
output/.git
output/.git/hello
output/.gitignore
output/foo
output/foo/bar
output/hello
$ find output -mindepth 1 -name '.git*' -prune -o -print
output/foo
output/foo/bar
output/hello

[justinmayer]

Great. Any idea as to the full command to delete everything but the .git directory and its contents?

[rupert]

Delete everything except .git:

$ find $(OUTPUTDIR) -mindepth 1 -name .git -prune -o -delete

Delete everything except .git, .gitignore etc:

$ find $(OUTPUTDIR) -mindepth 1 -name '.git*' -prune -o -delete

[justinmayer]

In my testing, those commands do the same as I noted previously: preserves the .git directory itself but nukes everything inside it.

[rupert]

I wrote the commands for Mac OS X find. I've since found that the GNU version of find doesn't support using -prune with -delete.

@justinmayer, can you try:

$ find $(OUTPUTDIR) -mindepth 1 -name '.git*' -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

$ find output
output
output/.git
output/.git/hello
output/.gitignore
output/foo
output/foo/bar
output/hello
$ make clean
find /Users/rupert/rupertb.com/output -mindepth 1 -name '.git*' -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
$ find output
output
output/.git
output/.git/hello
output/.gitignore

[justinmayer]

I actually did my testing on Mac OS X 10.8.2 to produce the behavior described above.

I thought about xargs, but once we get to the point of piping things to rm -rf, I think we've crossed the line over into... a potentially bad place. ;^)

Honestly, if folks want to avoid nuking .git, .hg, and other files/directories in the output folder, they are probably better off installing and using ack instead of wrangling with find. Perhaps someone would care to write up an appropriate line for the Makefile using ack and then add it to our Tips page?

[justinmayer]

Instead of the Makefile, I believe that output folder cleaning behavior should, whenever possible, be handled by pelican.util's clean_output_dir function and the DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting. To that end, I've proposed a solution to this problem via PR #944. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

[justinmayer]

I've introduced the OUTPUT_RETENTION setting to address this use case. I hope folks find it to be useful.