CLEAN_EXCLUDE add regex or only affect TARGET_FOLDER?

[jerdra]

Hey!

I have a setup where I maintain multiple versions of my documentation on github pages (one for each tag, these appear as directories named after their respective tags in my gh-pages root directory). These are set to update whenever a new tag is released using the CLEAN: true setting for this action. This part works as intended.

However I also plan to maintain a dev version (in a dev directory) which updates on push actions to my dev branch. I can't set CLEAN: true here since it would wipe out my tagged documentation. Ideally, I'd like to update the dev directory but only after cleaning it out, to ensure that we don't have old pages lying around within the directory. Is there a solution for these sorts of setups? Two ways that I can think of to deal with these scenarios are:

1. CLEAN_EXCLUDE takes a regex, this would be more flexible that listing each of the directories to maintain
2. CLEAN only affects TARGET_FOLDER when both are used in combination

Are these already implemented features (i can't find info on a regex, or special behaviours w/TARGET_FOLDER)? I can imagine this being useful when you want to update only a subset of the gh-pages branch, let me know what you think!

[jerdra]

Just tested the latter suggestion (CLEAN + TARGET_FOLDER) and it looks like it works as I'd like it to! Should this behaviour be documented in the README perhaps?

[Pike]

Yeah, updating the docs sounds good to me.

The docs for clean need to be updated anyway, #373 accidentally(?) started documenting that option to be on by default, which it isn't. AFAICT.

[Pike]

So, clean is true by default, but the docs weren't consistent about that. I've taken a stab at making that consistent in #559

[jerdra]

thanks for setting this up @Pike. One very minor comment is that it might provide more clarity to explicitly state that clean will examine the folder specified by the target-folder option if it is set. Otherwise it will examine the default deployment directory (root directory of gh-pages branch).

I think you already refer to a "target folder", but having the if-else clause would make it very explicit how that is determined