--incremental=filename.md for incremental build without --watch or --serve

[LeaVerou]

Not sure if this is a bug or a feature request. The --incremental flag is a wonderful thing: instead of rebuilding a whole site, it rebuilds only the files relevant to the one that changed. However, it seems to only be available when running in watch mode. I’ve often needed to only periodically rebuild; I save often and running the watcher often makes my system veeeery sloooow after a while, especially since I have many 11ty websites that I often edit in parallel. However, this also means I lose access to this wonderful feature: even if I were willing to manually specify the file that changed, there is no way to do so.

It would be great if --incremental worked without --watch. It could automatically detect which files have changed by storing the last time it ran somewhere and comparing timestamps. Or, worst case, even if it allowed providing a glob or filename manually, it would still be an immense help.

[zachleat]

v3.0.0-alpha.14 will include support for --incremental=filename to do an incremental build without --watch or --serve.

[zachleat]

Work based on the singleTemplateScope feature that was included for the the serverless plugin: b5fc1c3

More background here: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/serverless/#compile-the-data-cascade-for-the-project

[zachleat]

Example output from https://github.com/zachleat/zachleat.com:

npx @11ty/eleventy --quiet --incremental=index.liquid
[11ty/eleventy-img] 1 image optimized (1 cached)
[11ty] Wrote 1 file (skipped 481) in 2.12 seconds (v3.0.0-alpha.14)

[zachleat]

Subscribe to #984 for full cold-start incremental support!

[zachleat]

Filed related issue for --incremental=glob enhancement here: #3335

[deebloo]

hmmmm to get this working with wireit I need to manually figure out that list of changed files

[zachleat]

@deebloo can you file an enhancement request? I’m curious if --incremental=filename --to=json works for that use case though

[deebloo]

@zachleat maybe I am confused then. --incremental=filename only builds that one file right? I was thinking I would need to pass a list of files to 11ty.

[zachleat]

@deebloo Ah, no—we’ll generate the dependency map for the file and build the known dependency files too.

[deebloo]

gotcha, but if I had two disparate files I would need to do both right? so a.liquid and b.liquid and they had nothing to do with on another. I guess maybe that is my question. When I have multiple pages, do I need to pass those multiple entry files to --incremental?

[zachleat]

@deebloo you’d need to run those sequentially until we add support for #3334

[deebloo]

gotcha I understand now, thanks! it looks like there are other issues that would handle my use-case