config option to ignore paths

[tvald]

It's desirable to place rules for ignoring/excluding paths in .prettierrc rather than in .prettierignore, so that configuration for Prettier is self-contained within a single file.

(Of secondary concern, the prettier-vscode extension should soon support configuring the location of .prettierrc, but not .prettierignore. In general, more configuration files are just harder to deal with.)

For prior art, consider TypeScript's exclude configuration option:

// tsconfig.json
{
  "exclude": [
    "node_modules",
    "**/*.spec.ts"
  ]
}

[ikatyang]

Related: #3460, #2691, and #3764.

[saadq]

May be worth mentioning that one of the benefits for allowing this is to improve the usage of shareable Prettier configs. My team has a shareable Prettier config that we're using across our packages, but we still need to create separate .prettierignore files that list out all our globs in each one. Allowing this to be store inside the shareable config would be great.

[charles-allen]

When running Prettier in a directory, I believe it will look for .prettierrc in ancestor directories, but it will not do the same for .prettierignore. As a result, I'm currently duplicating ignores (to support executing prettier module-by-module).

I believe, in addition to merging rc & ignore, this issue would also allow me to eliminate duplicate ignores by centralizing them under one .prettierrc (TL;DR: I could delete all the files below with comments; .eslintrc shown for comparison).

.eslintrc.js
.prettierrc.js
.prettierignore           # separate file
admin/.prettierignore     # duplicate
common/.prettierignore    # duplicate
docs/.prettierignore      # duplicate
functions/prettierignore  # duplicate
hosting/.prettierignore   # duplicate

[ssbarnea]

At this moment, for practical reasons, .prettierignore is a symlink to .gitignore but that prevents us from adding other exclude for files that are tracked in git but for which we do not want to use prettier.

The current options make it very hard to use prettier or to adopt prettier on bigger codebases as reformatting cannot happen over the night, it can easily take many months, especially if you happen to have at least one developer in the team that dislikes formatters. They will do their best to fight every related change.

[eddiemonge]

Is this a feature someone can work on or does the team not want this option?

[TomSssM]

Yeah, would really appreciate this feature, having to duplicate .prettierignore for each leave package in a monorepo is inconvenient

[ssbarnea]

The worst part is that the prettierignore would always have to extend the already existing gitignore file.

If we would use gitignore implicitly and add extra ignores from config file, we could avoid having two files for prettier at repository root.

[dawsbot]

Everyone loves this request. I'd be happy to implement this if the core team can agree it'll get merged @prettier 🙏

I need fewer files at the root of the project.

[kevinwolfcr]

@prettier is there a way we can see this implemented? It is not a breaking change, and it will make a lot of people life's easier by allowing them to share their ignored paths, and easily picked by other tools (IDE extensions, other libraries relying on prettier, etc).

[tjx666]

• In order to ignore one file, I need to add a file .prettierignore. This is too heavy.
• This also make it hard to share ignore config.

[andreavaccari]

I found two alternative workarounds until this feature is implemented.

Opt 1: Exclude files using Prettier's requirePragma:

• Symlink .prettierignore to .gitignore to ignore all gitignored files:

ln .gitignore .prettierignore

• Edit .prettierrc.cjs and include an override that requires pragmas:

overrides: [
  {
    files: [
      "package-lock.json",
    ],
    options: { requirePragma: true },
  },
],

In this example, package-lock.json is tracked by git but ignored by prettier.

Caveats:

• It is possible to ignore directories with this approach, but prettier will still iterate over each file to check if the pragma is present. This is why it is still helpful to symlink the gitignore file to properly skip large directories like node_modules.
• It looks like some file types (e.g. .svelte) are still formatted even without a pragma. If you choose to use this approach, make sure to test that the files you intend to ignore are actually skipped with prettier --check.

Opt 2: Run prettier with eslint using with eslint-plugins-prettier

• Edit .eslintrc to use the prettier plugin and ignore the appropriate files:

extends: ["plugin:prettier/recommended"],
ignorePatterns: [
  require("parse-gitignore").parse(".gitignore").patterns,
  "package-lock.json"
],

Running prettier via eslint is however discouraged in the docs.

---

Neither workaround is desirable, and I hope a config option is provided soon.

[treshugart]

My use case involves both prettier and pretty-quick. While it's not too bad to run --workspaces with prettier in CI, for DX it's preferable not to run pretty-quick with --workspaces due to the start up time for each workspace. Doing this once at the root is preferable.

However, if you run pretty-quick at the root, Prettier respects the root .prettierignore but not the closest .prettierignore to the files being formatted in each workspace (in conflict with the behavior of both .gitignore and Prettier's configuration file). I've seen this create significant confusion among monorepo developers and it would be fantastic if we could get a feature that both respects proximity as well as extensibility.

[srMarquinho]

This is particularly interesting to us as we have a centralised .prettierrc. This way we don't have copy/maintain .prettierignore across projects.

[dawsbot]

Someone should take this on. It seems like a lot of people want this (including us)

I won't have any power to merge or push this along, but it's certainly something many want with no visible downsides when executed properly using standard conventions the way other tools do this.

[gyhyfj]

I really want this because prettier config files can be extended but single ignore file cannot be extend

[srMarquinho]

Worth noting that this issue is about 5 years old.

[eddiemonge]

Worth noting that this issue is about 5 years old.

5 years of a want is a long time. That should have no bearing on prioritizing though. The @prettier team has not yet said whether they would even consider this, thus discouraging people from even wanting to try to implement it

[rotu]

A possible fix is to add a new parser type that ignores files.

Then ignoring files could be done like, e.g.:

{
"overrides": [
  { "files": ["dist/**/*.js"], "options": { "parser": "ignore" } }
]
}

[regnaio]

@fisker Any chance this can be considered?

I'm looking to remove all .___ignore files

For example, I can remove ESLint's .eslintignore and ignore files using ignorePatterns: [...] in .eslintrc.js. I'm hoping to remove .prettierignore and ignore files using a config option in .prettierrc.js

If everything can be moved into a JS config file, it works better with projects with nested directories. And it eliminates the need for a .prettierignore file in every single directory