Clear dist only when the new files are ready

[etienne-dldc]

Current Behavior

When working with a monorepo or with linked package if your package was build and you have another bundler using the files in dist. If you either build or start the compilation it will start by deleting the content of dist which does not make bundler happy. In most cases you have to restart the bundler.

Example:

Let say you have two packages app is a create-react-app and b is using tsdx. app is using b.

You build the b package, then start working on app (react-scripts start in app). But then you need to change something in b so you change some file then build b (tsdx build in b) at that point react-scripts will crash because one file is missing and it will not recover even when the file are back. You have to restart app to make it work again.

Desired Behavior

When tsdx build is run, it would be nice if the dist folder was not cleared until the next build output is ready. This way react-scripts and other bundlers would not fail.

Suggested Solution

I guess it should be possible to build to a temp directory then move the files at the end.

Who does this impact? Who is this for?

People working with Monorepo or with linked packages.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Just restart the script when it fail but it's annoying...

[agilgur5]

Hmmm, looking at clean-webpack-plugin's code, this is actually somewhat involved -- it tracks the difference between previous output and current output and deletes stale output.

Maybe we can do something less involved by just deleting everything other than the current output. That would work for an initial build too, not just watch.

Notably tracking wouldn't fully work for certain features -- like setting useTsconfigDeclarationDir makes rpts2 pass the emit step to TS, meaning that declarations are created out-of-band and therefore not tracked by Rollup.

Existing plugins like rollup-plugin-delete (probably has the most options out of it, rollup-plugin-clean, rollup-plugin-cleaner) don't do any tracking and so aren't much different from what TSDX currently does. Would basically have to make a new plugin

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You can also disable cleaning with --noClean if that helps as a workaround

[etienne-dldc]

Um, I didn't knew about --noClean... Any reason it's not a default on watch command ?

[agilgur5]

I think that's more to do that this exists as a workaround for this issue, see #282 and #272 . This seems actually to be a duplicate of #260, which should be renamed for clarity

--noClean does create potential for there to be stale build artifacts left in your dist/ directory, e.g. assets that were later removed or changed.
That would mean, for instance, if you had a dev server serving those assets, they would continue to be served even after removal from the build, as the folder hadn't been cleared.

[etienne-dldc]

Closing this because the --noClean option works for my use case.