Allow the fully clean generation of artifact

[omarlopesino]

Currently, the Drupal Artifact Builder, as its description purposes, it wraps an already build Drupal site. This means that before creating the artifact, some steps like composer install + npm compilation must be done before running the artifact building.

In the other side, when the command is run in local developer environments, the artifact generated usually includes more changes than needed. For example, it includes some files that are ignored and accumulated in the site. ALso, there are ignored files that are also copied, enlarging the time spent on it (s.e.: #3).

Furthermore, the artifact is currently being generated in the root folder the command is executed. This is not a problem except when there are unexpected errors that makes the command exit before finishing and clean it up. It would be optimal to generate the artifact into a temporary folder.

In this issue I would like to discuss these issues so we can make the Drupal artifact builder able to:

• Run library download / asset compilation steps before generating the artifact.
• Perform a clean artifact building: instead of using the current codebase, shallow clone the self repository in a temporary folder.
• Generate the artifact into a temporary folder.

@rsanzante @jorgetutor what do you think?

[omarlopesino]

Below are my thoughts about how to implement this:

Run library download / asset compilation steps before generating the artifact.

To preserve the old behaviour , this can be optional. So, those who want only wrap the artifact, will not have this functionality.
In case of needing it, it would be possible to set the following configuration in .drupal-artifact-builder.yml:

commands
   artifact:
      - composer install
      - npm run build

Those are two example commands to build composer and frontend assets.

Perform a clean artifact building: instead of using the current codebase, shallow clone the self repository in a temporary folder.

This can be performed by running git clone --depth 1 . It can only be done when the branch is obtained from parameters/configuration and the repository available by git commands. If this is unwsnted it could be disabled by parameters/configuration.

Generate the artifact into a temporary folder.

This is straight, by changing the paths in code to sys_get_temp_dir and leaving the current folder as a fallback.

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I want to leave this here before I forget, as I am not sure this can be prioritized for now and there is currently no mutual agree between maintainers. Additionally I want to motivate this issue by saying that generating artifacts in local may lead to unexpected commited files, as it is difficult to control every file that is located under ignored folders. Adding an unwanted file may lead to security risks.

[rsanzante]

I agree it would be better to do it cleanly. A shallow copy is important for big repositories. Finally, temp dir should be configurable, because if sys_get_temp_dir probably will be /tmp. Lately, some distros mount temp dir (/tmp) in memory. In that case the artefact generation will done all in memory: faster, but it may require 500MB easily.

[rsanzante]

This has now higher priority because the script currently allows manual error on artefact generation process. Given it relies on the current state of the code folder to generate the artefact, you can generate the wrong artefact if tun the script with a code folder wrong state (for example, after changing composer.json but not running composer install).

This script works very good in automatic environments, where the process has defined steps, but as said above can lead to errors if done manually and a step is forgot (mainly, not running composer install).

[omarlopesino]

Completely agree. It will be developed as soon as possible.