Impossible to ignore symlinks; hard to control what Flow parses

[kentonv]

My code's directory structure contains a symlink to ...

Flow happily follows this symlink and ends up parsing all kinds of code that doesn't actually belong to my project.

Unfortunately, naming the symlink in [ignore] doesn't work: Flow only checks ignore rules against the absolute path after resolving all symlinks.

Naming the actual parent directory of my source directory in [ignore] also doesn't work: Flow fails with:

The flow server is not responding (0 retries remaining): [processing] -
Out of retries, exiting!

There are no errors in the server log. Running flow again here (with the server already running from the previous execution) simply says No errors!, which I know is false, so one possibility is that flow has decided to ignore all my code because it is all under the ignored parent directory.

I really just want to tell flow exactly what to parse. I don't want my project root to be included by default.

[kevinpumpup]

I have a similar problem which I can workaround but not perfectly.

I have a symlink to ../foo from current project and I want to ignore certain path like ../foo/node_modules/fbjs. I ended up doing the following in the current project's .flowconfig:

[ignore]
.*/foo/node_modules/fbjs/.*

The above path is not perfect because it could potentially ignore things like some/other/path/foo/node_modules/fbjs/.*. But as @kentonv had pointed out, [ignore] are matched with absolute paths (also see https://flow.org/en/docs/config/ignore/). So I am not sure if there is any better way as of now.

[lll000111]

What is the platform? I have the opposite problem on Windows: Flow does not find files behind a symbolic link directory path #4015

[pietro909]

Any news on this? @kevinpumpup I've tried your workaround but doesn't work for me.

Flow version: 0.45.0

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44727047/prevent-facebook-flow-from-checking-linked-npm-package

[aleclarson]

I guess [ignore] is applied after the root is crawled?

It would be cool if it worked like this:

• Crawl the root, but don't follow any symlinks
• Apply [ignore] to the resulting file paths
• Resolve any symlinks for flow's usage

In the current state, using symlinks in my node_modules is not scalable.

Is there a chance this issue will be tackled within the next month?

I'm using flow v0.59 on macOS v10.13.

[clintwood]

I bumped up against this issue in my lerna monorepo where lerna bootstrap will install project packages to <PROJECT_ROOT>/node_modules as symlinks.

So if, for example, you have [ignore] .*/packages/.*/lib/.* (where lib is the build output which includes .flow files) it will also ignore <PROJECT_ROOT>/node_modules/<installed-symlinked-package-name>/lib/.* since these resolve to the same path as the ignored package libs.

Also the reverse happens where if you [ignore] <PROJECT_ROOT>/node_modules/.* the symlinked packages from <PROJECT_ROOT>/packages/.* will also be ignored since they resolve to the same path.

I think @aleclarson's suggestion should resolve this.