Support "exclude" property in tsconfig.json

[ahejlsberg]

Implements #3043. A tsconfig.json file that doesn't specify a files property (and therefore implicitly references all *.ts files in all subdirectories) can now contain an exclude property that specifies a list of files and/or directories to exclude from the compilation. The exclude property must be an array of strings that each specify a file or folder name relative to the location of the tsconfig.json file. For example:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "out": "test.js"
    },
    "exclude": [
        "node_modules",
        "test.ts",
        "utils/t2.ts"
    ]
}

The exclude list does not support wilcards. It must simply be a list of files and/or directories.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

This should probably have a name that ties it more close to 'fileNames'. i.e. 'excludedFileNames'. That way we know that this is supposed to complement that tsconfig property.

[ahejlsberg]

The other property is called files, not fileNames. Since you can exclude both files and directories it would have to be excludedFilesAndDirectories which I think is over the top. I like the simple exclude.

[basarat]

exclude.

excludes perhaps?

[yuit]

I like excludes as well. If you decide to change, please update the variable and parameter name

[rcollette]

Meh. Seems to completely ignore the community feedback about globs.

[basarat]

Seems to completely ignore the community feedback about globs.

Adding globbing support for matching might not be that hard if we can just copy in this battle tested code : https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch/blob/master/minimatch.js It is MIT https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch/blob/master/LICENSE

[rcollette]

I should have added more specifics. We keep all feature related code in the same directory. Unit tests are named *.spec.js Doing a build and excluding tests (or otherwise) doesn't work for us when files must be excluded by name and not by pattern.

[paulvanbrenk]

👍
Though I can see the advantage of having globbbing, and adding a similar include property could prove to be useful.

[rbuckton]

@ahejlsberg We discussed this briefly, but I have an alternative approach that supports "glob"-style pattern matching with recursive directories in this pull request: #3232.

[troyji]

I suspect tsconfig.json is destined for much broader use in the future. Using the simple key exclude could become ambiguous quickly. Consider a more specific key name.

[DanielRosenwasser]

Pluralization ("excludes") would be better, but I'd too prefer a more specific name.

[ahejlsberg]

We're going with the simple exclude property for now, but we'll continue to refine #3232 with the eventual goal of supporting glob-style patterns. Anything we do in #3232 will be backwards compatible with the simple exclude list.

[tinganho]

Does language service take exclude option into consideration? I happen to have the TS repo under node_modules/typescript and it takes a long time to autocomplete things.

I'm on VSCode 0.3 on a Mac. And I'm using the current master branch.

[mhegazy]

@tinganho this has been checked in recently. The Language Service support should be in 1.6 by the time it ships.

[basarat]

@rbuckton I'd like to add support for this and completely remove atom-typescript's custom filesGlob support. Can you think of any use case where a glob is still needed if exclude is supported? Don't want to do a breaking change if I'll need to reimplement it 🌹

[basarat]

Can you think of any use case where a glob is still needed if exclude is supported

Quick use case: user needs to include source from only a few folders. So ignore my last query 😉

[Mig1st4ck]

I use fileGlobs to order my ts files.

"filesGlob": [
        "./app/**/*.module.ts",
        "./app/**/*.ts",
        "!./node_modules/**/*.ts"
    ],

[mbalex99]

@Mig1st4ck your filesGlob reference is from Atom correct? This is not (yet) a native tsconfig feature right?

[basarat]

@mbalex99 yes. It is not native

[HeikoH]

is this available in 1.5.3? Adding an exclude option to my tsconfig.json seems to have no effect when I run tsc

[HeikoH]

I guess not as it works as expected with a nightly (1.6) build

[JaKXz]

It would be great if the exclude property supported globs. I'm sure that's been said somewhere, but I'm trying to do something similar to @Mig1st4ck and not having luck excluding files with the filesGlob property and the ! property (under the assumption that filesGlob handles the ! glob operator and excludes those files).

EDIT: on second thought, maybe my issue is only exclusive to TypeStrong/atom-typescript#558... apologies for noise...