Automatic entries via a glob pattern

At Symfony Live, @trappar had an interesting idea: a way to automatically add entries based off of a glob pattern. For example, perhaps all .js files in the root of assets/ should be entry files (assets/*.js). Then it would be cool to be able to say:

Encore.addEntries('assets/*.js')

The one problem is that when you add new files, it would mean that your webpack.config.js config will need to change (we would need to add the new entry). That’s a problem because you’ll need to restart encore if you’re using --watch. So… that’s a bit of a “gotcha” with this feature. We could manually “watch” this directory for new files in Encore and add a notification (#187) in this situation.

[trappar]

@Lyrkan

What would be the name of the generated entries in this case?

In the project where I’m doing this I use something like the following to convert a glob path/pattern into an entry object:

const path = require('path');
const glob = require('glob');​

const globToEntry = (base, pattern) => {
    return glob.sync(path.join(base, pattern)).reduce((entry, file) => {
        const parsedPath = path.parse(path.relative(base, file));
        entry[path.join(parsedPath.dir, parsedPath.name)] = path.resolve(file);
        return entry;
    }, {});
};

I like this because it maintains the same folder structure inside my assets folder when the public versions are built, which allows me to use something like: globToEntry('assets', '**/*.js') to turn assets/admin/users.js into public/build/admin/users.js

Wouldn’t that encourage bad practices?

I personally don’t see having many entry points as a bad practice. Any significantly large MPA is going to end up having tons of them, and that isn’t a terribly inefficient way of building an app as long as common chunks and code splitting are being used properly. Sure moving toward SPA architecture might be more ideal for many applications using Webpack, but that doesn’t mean that this package shouldn’t support other styles of application as well. Just my opinion.

[weaverryan]

Closing this, at least for now. Not sure it’s a good idea, and there are complications