Support recursive ** globs in --ignore

[asmeurer]

Description / Summary

Currently the --ignore flag supports globs, but doesn't support recursive **-style globs. This makes it hard to ignore directories generated by autosummary.

Value / benefit

I have to come up with a regular expression to emulate this, which is annoying.

Implementation details

I looked at the implementation and it wasn't straightforward to add because the way it is currently implemented it uses fnmatch, and for whatever reason, recursive globs are not supported by fnmatch. They are only supported by glob, which reads the filesystem, but the current implementation uses a function that doesn't read the file system, presumably to be easier to test. Presumably the only reasonable fix here is to use some external fnmatch module that supports recursive globbing (I don't know of one, but presumably something like it exists), or to somehow automatically convert a recursive glob into a regex.

Tasks to complete

No response

[cbarrick]

I ran into this same problem.

Deleting a directory that contains the output of sphinx-autogen/autosummary causes sphinx-autobuild to enter a rebuild loop. One rebuild is triggered per generated file. The solution is to ignore the directory all together.

As an alternative (or in addition) to supporting recursive globs, sphinx-autobuild could ignore the entire directory passed to --ignore, e.g. --ignore=docs/api.

[ianhi]

Agree that it would be nice to easily ignore directories with glob. But I got this working using the re-ignore option.:

--re-ignore api.*

stopped the infinite loop

[guideloom]

I just hit this as well. Really need a way for sphinx-autobuild to ignore a folder and everything underneath it. I have it watching my source folder, and "_build" is a subfolder under that. If someone does a "make html" in the source folder, sphinx-autobuild runs once for EACH file changed/updated under the _build folder. Wish we could do "--ignore _build" or "--ignore _build/"