Discussion: Too many config files in the root folder

[shairez]

@johnpapa raised a concern he got from people who saw how many files the CLI is generating.

So he offered to move the CLI files into an .angular-cli folder so at least we'll have a little less noise.

Points raised:

The good parts

• The root folder will be a little less messy
• We can set an example for other projects to clean up our dirty dirty root folder :)

The bad parts

• People are used to stuff being in the root folder
• Unless we can convince all of the other projects to keep their file in a config folder this isn't gonna change soon

We'll love to hear more feedback from the community, so feel free to add your input and vote in favor or not.

[filipesilva]

Ah, I had actually misunderstood John's point: if it is just the cli specific files then the only two what would be moved are angular-cli.json and angular-cli-build.js. This wouldn't present any kind of extra config issue.

All the others are related to external tools.

[shairez]

I'll edit the post

[johnpapa]

Yes, to be clear I meant just the angular cli specific files go in the .cli folder (or whatever it is called)

BTW ... idea came from @spboyer "Beardy"

[spboyer]

@filipesilva I would also like to see if .clang-format could move as well

[hansl]

@johnpapa: There might be a problem with moving angular-cli-build.js into a separate folder; people are expected to change it in their project to suit their need. Until we have a compelling story where the build files isn't needed for installing and building third party libraries, pushing it inside a dot-folder might hide it from people who need it.

However, angular-cli.json does not need to be visible and hand edited as it's expected people will use get/set commands to change it (but is still manually editable).

[hansl]

So basically my point is that a .cli would be relative very empty. Just moving angular-cli.json to .angular-cli.json (or even .cli.json) would probably be fine.

[joshwiens]

@hansl Couldn't we just go with the best of both worlds. Stick everything in the folder mentioned by @shairez & @johnpapa and then if the user wants / needs to override you could stick that in the root directory.

Bit more work but imo it's a viable compromise.

[hansl]

The user might not see the directory at all on POSIX systems, depending on their editor. So they wouldn't know they're there.

[joshwiens]

I would think the vast majority of us are well accustomed to dotfiles

[hansl]

I know some people will file issues with it, and it's avoidable in a really simple way.

Personally I'd rather see the following:

• .clang-format go away until you run your first ng format.
• all the karma+protractor configuration go into a test/ folder.
• angular-cli-build.js could go into config/.
• tslint.json could go into config/.

That leaves the following files at the root:

• .gitignore
• .angular-cli.json
• typings.json

Of all of these, the only one that has to live at the root is .gitignore. typings may go away with TS Next (ultimately will). Angular CLI makes sense in the root because it's what we're going to use to find the project you're in (we find the closest .angular-cli.json file).

So really, there's so much to do without even touching the JSON file, I don't know why we're bikeshedding on it.

[hansl]

Also, please note that one of my goal with the ng install story is to kill the angular-build-cli.js file altogether. The content will be split between angular-cli.json and addons.

[joshwiens]

@hansl That sounds intriguing :)

[filipesilva]

@hansl don't think it makes much sense to make a test folder just to contain two config files. If it's absolutely necessary to do away with them, might as well go into the config/ folder as well.

Adding .clang-format only on the first run of ng format also means that until then, the project has the clang-format dependency but no configuration. Might as well put it in the config folder and have all configs on the same place, otherwise users will have to look into several folders (./, ./config and ./test so far) for config files.

@spboyer I don't think clang-format should be moved into a cli dir, mostly because it's not a cli thing. Like tslint, it's a third party tool. It also represents a point of configuration: if a user wants to auto format his code with some other tool, all he has to do is change the format scripts in package.json and ng format will run that.

[hansl]

There's also the karma-shim.js, which really we need a way to customize but will not be changed by most people.

3 files in total. 🤷