Flag to delete output folder before building

🙋 Feature request

A flag/option to delete the output folder before building.

It’s common place to do that in order to avoid mixing dev asssets and production assets.

🤔 Expected Behavior

Simply remove the output destination recursively before building via a flag Should be enabled by default.

😯 Current Behavior

It has to be scripted manually.

💁 Possible Solution

Per-target flag/option deleteBeforeBuild which is enabled by default in production build mode. Simply removes the output folder.

🔦 Context

Most people add rm -rf dist; before the parcel command

That’s bad for windows users since rm doesn’t work that way there

Having it in parcel would make things a lot easier and save the hassle of manually adding the recursive rm command

💻 Examples

$ npx parcel build index.html -o dist --delete-before-build

{
  "target": {
    "browser": {
      "main": "index.html",
      "deleteBeforeBuild": true
    }
  }
}

[ermarkar]

this is going to be implemented? I guess this is basic functionality, lib should provide, --clean-before-build or --clean flag can be implemented

[devongovett]

Also unlike Parcel 1, Parcel 2 can output files wherever you want (not necessarily into a dist directory). For example, you could have this in your package.json:

{
  "name": "my-package",
  "source": "src/index.js",
  "main": "index.js"
}

In that example, the dist directory is actually the main package dir with all your source code too. You wouldn’t want to delete that.