[astro-dev-only] Exclude with Symbol in Filename or File in Folder

[deepspaceaxolotl]

Would be amazing to have some kind of symbol that can be added to the beginning of filenames to exclude them (might need an option to turn this behaviour off in case someone has a conflict with it) and similarly an empty file that could be added to folders to exclude the whole folder and its children! (Unless someone thinks excluding all child folders isn't ideal. Maybe two files that would be checked for, one that excludes all of the child folders too and one that excludes just the files from the folder in question but any child folders are still included/checked independently.)

[gingerchew]

I think I saw somewhere that _ was reserved (might be making that up) but what about #?

[gingerchew]

I guess the most ideal would be to set the symbol in the config with a string/RegExp

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [
    devOnlyRoutes({
      symbol: /^(#|__)/,
      // or
      symbol: '#'
    }),
  ],
});

[deepspaceaxolotl]

TIL that # is not a forbidden character on Linux or Windows. I'm definitely in favour of a config option!

[gingerchew]

Can confirm it is also allowed on macos (don't know if that's all unix or just apple being ✨quirky✨)

[essential-randomness]

I think I saw somewhere that _ was reserved (might be making that up) but what about #?

_ is indeed "reserved"! It's used to exclude files or a whole subfolders of src/pages/ from rendering.

...which could come in handy if we flip the problem around: what about adding the reverse configuration, and enabling some "_ routes" in development (and only in development)?

Something like

    devOnlyRoutes({
      enableInDevMode: [
          // a glob, or regex, or similar
          "_dev-only/**/*.astro"
      ]
   })

(definitely welcoming suggestions on the naming)

I have no clue if the Astro Gods would slay me for attempting this, but that just makes me more curious to try.

In general, the right way to write this library would be to add disabled routes in development, rather than removing them later. I thought I'd need to add a pages-dev directory for that, but this could work too... maybe.

[essential-randomness]

Also re: a symbol config. Two things here:

1. A regex like /\/#.+\// should already work to exclude folder + children starting with # (though please do run this with dryRun: true first, it's past midnight). Similarly I believe /\/#.+\.astro$/ (or similar) should work for a file prefix.
2. Since it's an extension of the "regex case", unless I'm missing something, this shouldn't be too hard to implement. Happy to guide someone who wants to try their hand at it! It looks scary, but all that's needed is to pass a couple extra regexes here.

[gingerchew]

Had a discussion with some core dev members about this, they had some insight that could be useful.

[deepspaceaxolotl]

I'm not in there so I can't see it, could you provide a brief summary perhaps?

[gingerchew]

Hmmm, it covered a lot of things.

Gist was essentially the routes we could take were:

• Make a magic folder (a similar to how src/pages/ works, so src/dev)
• Use a prefix on the file name (src/pages/_dev.file.astro for example would exclude it from Astro's pages gathering, and then we could inject it when dev is run with an integration)
• Accept a glob/array of string and inject them based on that
• Use a Vite transform plugin to search for files with export const dev = true and exclude them that way