Exclude directories from analysis

[colindean]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When I tried to run fawltydeps for the first time, it caught some stuff in my project's dist and build directories. E.g., dist contains a requirements.txt generated from my Poetry config.

Describe the solution you'd like

These directories could be ignored entirely, likely by default but also by configuration.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I could run make clean to delete these directories before running fawltydeps, but that'd cost extra time later on my workstation. It'd also necessitate running fawltydeps in CI before anything is generated.

[jherland]

Thanks for reporting!

I'm wondering if it would be "safe" to always ignore dist/ and build/ or if there cases where that would backfire. Maybe safer to take our ignore list from some other source, like .gitignore. Would that work in your case?

For now I added this issue to our roadmap (#195).

[colindean]

I think it would be safe to use the .gitignore in this case. Thanks for considering this!

[jherland]

Note to selves: When we get around to implementing a better mechanism for ignoring files, please take #326 (comment) into consideration; in particular: consider if there are cases where the search for code/deps/pyenv sources differ in what paths should be ignored.

For example: it might make sense for code and deps to ignore hidden (dot) dirs, while the pyenv search should descend into these dirs?

[md384]

I second this issues and would like to configuration argument that would accept globs (or just simple paths) to ignore to allow a little more flexibility.

[dorranh]

+1 for this feature. I've encountered the same issue when running FawltyDeps in a project which had a quick, ad-hoc virtual environment created in the project directory for experimentation purposes.

[jherland]

With the v0.15.0 release, we now support --exclude to ignore files and directories. For now, --exclude defaults to the .* pattern, meaning that "hidden" files/directories are excluded by default.

We don't (yet) exclude build/ and dist/ by default, so you'd have to specify --exclude build/ dist/ on the command-line (or exclude = ["build/", "dist/"] in the FawltyDeps section of your pyproject.toml)

I'm currently working on a --exclude-from option which will allow FawltyDeps to read exclude patterns from a file (like --exclude-from .gitignore), but with the basic --exclude option there I think we can close this issue. Feel free to reopen if I've overlooked something.