Feature request: Include/Exclude Interface for AWS Lambda Builders

[mildaniel]

Describe your idea/feature/enhancement

There are currently two opposing feature requests that go hand-in-hand. One is to include files/directories in the resultant build package, and one is for exclusion. Both of these are genuine use-cases across various runtimes, and, as such, we believe should be handled together though a common include/exclude interface for the Lambda Builders library.

Include: Issue #430, PR #431 Exclude: Issue #185, PR #424

This should start with an initial design document, and once approved, can be implemented. The important notes for the design to address:

• What does the interface look like? e.g. is part of the JSON RPC, is it through a configuration file, etc?
• How to make the implementation general across runtimes. Are there any runtimes for which this feature should be ignored?

[AdrianCarreno]

I think the functionality should be just like .gitignore or .dockerignore. Just have a .samignore file where you would put every path you don't want in the build.

[farridav]

:+1: Having an optional .samignore file that overides the hardcoded EXCLUDED_FILES seems like natural behaviour to me, afterall

Explicit is better than implicit - Zen of Python

It fits with developer expectations set by many other mature tools and could easily be a non breaking change by defaulting to the hardcoded EXCLUDED_FILES when this file is not present..

[ishan1608]

Has there any progress been made on this so far, to come up with a decision? We are facing similar stuff in our project, where we have a bunch of stuff like tests, tools etc. being added to the deployed code which we don't really need and is also causing our bundled zip files to become bloated.