Allow to create new projects (intelligently) in existing directory

[Relequestual]

When creating a new service via serverless create, cloudflare-workers template won't complete if .gitignore is present, and cannot be ignored.

Use case description

When creating a new service using the cloudflare-workers template (and likely others, I'm not sure), I may already have a .gitignore file which covers more things than just Serverless. I don't want to override it. Maybe I want to add to it. But I don't want to be blocked from creating the initial setup for a new service if I want to keep my .gitignore.

Proposed solution

Provide a CLI flag to avoid trying to create a .gitignore file.
Ideally, provide an option to merge with existing.

Related: #3582

[pgrzesik]

Hello @Relequestual 👋 Thanks a lot for reporting. Could you clarify your use case a bit more here?
The general use case of create command is to bootstrap a fresh project in a new project directory, in your case it looks like you already have some boilerplate in your project dir and want to populate it with the template, correct?
While I think we could potentially provide an option to skip trying to copy .gitignore, I'm wondering if that problem couldn't be bypassed by first running create and then adjusting the .gitignore. The same problem will be present e.g. when app.js or any other file that is a part of the template exists in the directory. Please let me know more about your specific use case, thanks in advance 🙇

[Relequestual]

Thanks @pgrzesik
I had created using an AWS template, but I needed to switch to using the Cloudflare version.

It's a little futile because I'm totally blocked by the jawdropping lack of support for using the workers.dev domain name (aka free tier) for Cloudflare. (I totally acknowledge this is not your problem and I believe comes from the Cloudflare run repo, but man, makes it a total dealbreaker for me and I'm sure many others.)

[pgrzesik]

Hey @Relequestual - unfortunately the support for Cloudflare is not great and the plugin wasn't updated in the past 2 years, which is a bummer and definitely a big blocker for a lot of people trying to provision Workers with the Framework.

As for the flow when creating a template, I think we could consider appending to existing .gitignore - I "looked around" and it seems like this is the approach that e.g. create-react-app takes when it detects existing .gitignore. @medikoo What do you think?

[medikoo]

@medikoo What do you think?

So far we assumed that creating project in an existing directory is a bad pattern, and also we shifted away from that with interactive CLI project setup, which in all cases creates new folder, and which is supposed to replace sls create that's scheduled to be deprecated.

With above there's no way provided to extend existing project with a template. Now I wonder, that maybe it's a use case we should support, and then as you @pgrzesik propose e.g. extend .gitignore rules.

At this point I would consider this as a new feature request, which we may have in our backlog

[Relequestual]

Hey @Relequestual - unfortunately the support for Cloudflare is not great and the plugin wasn't updated in the past 2 years, which is a bummer and definitely a big blocker for a lot of people trying to provision Workers with the Framework. - @pgrzesik

extreamly heavy and long sigh - Yes.

In fact, I tweeted about this fact yesterday.

It's a total dealbreaker...

The inability to use Serverless with free tier Cloudflare workers is a dealbreaker for me. So much so, that I'm shelving the (small) project in favour of using Zapier. I'm gutted. Truly.

I'll be back once I have proper access to aws, or a paid Cloudflare account, but it's just not a great situation. I mean, I worry that Serverless won't even work with a paid account, and I'm aprehensive about spending more time to work out if it's viable.

The cost for Cloudflare Workers is neglidagble... my time is not. Obviously it's free and open source so I can't make demands, but equally I want to make best use of my time, which is full time working on open source (JSON Schema).

I did note the lack of CFW examples.

Hiding by default as it's a little off topic for this issue. Should I file a new one or is this a known problem?

Any chance Serverless could fork and update it?

[Relequestual]

Now I wonder, that maybe it's a use case we should support, and then as you @pgrzesik propose e.g. extend .gitignore rules. - @medikoo

I'm still new to Serverless, but I thought the power of the open framework was the ability to configure and deploy to different cloud systems easily. Currently that seems no to be the case.

I'm attempting to solve a problem for our open source org (JSON Schema) that I anticipate others would also find useful. I would like for others to be able to fork and modify the config to deploy to the service of their choice.

Having tried to now do this, it doesn't appear that switching an existing Serverless based project to another provider is that straight forward.

Have I misunderstood the intent of the framework?

[pgrzesik]

I thought the power of the open framework was the ability to configure and deploy to different cloud systems easily.

That is the goal, however, each cloud provider has different functionalities and features available, which makes the configuration often be provider-specific. For that reason it's also not straightforward to switch an existing project to a whole another provider.

Any chance Serverless could fork and update it?

At this point in time I don't think there's a chance that we will be able to dedicate time to forking and maintaining Cloudflare Workers provider, sorry.

As for the original issue related to .gitignore, thanks for your input @medikoo, I believe the way to go with .gitignore is to append to existing one if it exists and crash on all other overlapping files.