Netlify CLI keeps adding overzealous and incorrect rule to .gitignore

[SleeplessByte]

Describe the bug

In my .gitignore I have the following intentional line:

/.netlify

Linking a new site / running CLI in several ways will incorrectly add:

# Local Netlify folder
.netlify

In order to make my monorepos work again I have to add:

!sites/**/.netlify

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Create a new git repo
2. Add .gitignore with /.netlify
3. Run netlify deploy
4. It has added the line to .gitignore

Configuration

npx envinfo --system --binaries --npmPackages netlify-cli --npmGlobalPackages netlify-cli


  System:
    OS: Windows 10 10.0.19042
    CPU: (12) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6800K CPU @ 3.40GHz
    Memory: 5.80 GB / 31.91 GB
  Binaries:
    Node: 12.18.2 - C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.EXE
    Yarn: 1.22.4 - ~\Documents\GitHub\delftsolutions\@introcloud\app\node_modules\.bin\yarn.CMD
    npm: 6.14.5 - C:\Program Files\nodejs\npm.CMD
  npmPackages:
    netlify-cli: ^3.10.12 => 3.10.12

Expected behavior

It does not add .netlify to .gitignore.

[SleeplessByte]

The biggest issue with this is that it will silently fail on changes / new files. You won't notice until your build starts failing somewhere else (for example, because there is no state.json available. It's counter-intuitive and frankly, I hate that it's doing something to my .gitignore without telling me.

[erezrokah]

Hi @SleeplessByte, linking #506 for context.
I agree this is not an ideal experience.

To clarify - you only want to ignore .netlify at the root level? Any reason you want to commit state.json?
Please note that the .netlify folder can also contain temporary files generated during netlify build and other information that should not be committed to the repo.

[SleeplessByte]

You got it.

We have our own build and then only use netlify deploy, so those other files never get generated.

state.json holds the siteId and is a far better tool to configure ci builds for a folder then trying to do it via environment variables.

[SleeplessByte]

The linked issue has very similar concerns (and remains unresolved).

I see the following options:

• only ignore the files that contain sensitive information,
• unignore state.json
• ask a user

The notion that you need to protect users who might not understand and therefore do this automatically is understandable, but in my opinion not the right way. By not notifying such a user, and make it a conscious decision, a user is never taught that the folder may contain sensitive data, and what that sensitive data is.

It's also pretty elitist to decide for everyone how their projects should be structured but I think that was made clear in the previous issue from 2 years ago :)

[erezrokah]

I think we can solve this by looking for a .netlify substring in the patterns here

cli/src/utils/gitignore.js

Line 95 in 14b1b77

if (!ignorePatterns || !ignorePatterns.patterns.includes('.netlify')) {

instead of trying to find a full match.

That would allow us to support both use cases WDYT?

Regardless we should add a log message when we add .netlify to .gitignore.

In addition we should re-visit the "sensitive data" reasoning since users can unignore .netlify anyways or copy that directory with the folder to another location unaware of having that folder copied around.

Finally we'll need to make sure that if users do commit state.json (out of choice or mistake) we handle possible failures resulting from it (e.g. the site was deleted so the information in state.json is no longer valid).

How does that sound?

[SleeplessByte]

All that sounds like it will solve my issues, the original issue, and potential future issues, so it got my seal of approval.