Clean flag for builds

I know in this question on stack overflow one of the brunch contributors suggested using rm -rf public/ through npm scripts as the answer for the equivalent of a clean command. I really don’t think that is a good answer. A tool like brunch should really support doing clean builds. Three options I can think of (in order from worst to best):

• Production build should always do a clean and build, since production is the time it really matters if you have extra junk files.
• Add a --clean flag to build
• Since the output directory should only contain the output of the build, just delete any files that don’t match the current output

The last seems to fit best with the brunch approach and would fit well with watch. So for example, I could rename an asset and brunch watch would copy the new asset over and realize that the old asset name was no longer part of the output and delete it.

[paulmillr]

We’ll try to focus on the feature as a part of 2.7 release (mid apr)

[goshacmd]

@ysle no, we have not worked on this yet, but we will eventually

Implementation wise, adding an artifact file (where to? root? public?) might not be the cleanest solution, but then, there doesn’t seem to be a different option for tracking which files were produced by brunch and which were not.

Should the cleaning happen only during initial start and not through the run time of watch?

Also, this will still leave files in public generated by brunch plugins (in onCompile for example).

@paulmillr @es128 do you have any thoughts regarding this?