Ignore certain files for changes on_serve or stop next rebuild until the current finishes

[mondeja]

I'm developing a plugin that, essentially, do: from a file foo.md inside the root of the documentation directory, creates another file foo.ext, if it doesn't exist previously. So the markdown files of the documentation are linked to other files.

The problem is: if I edit foo.md or foo.ext after executing mkdocs serve it triggers an infinite loop of rebuilds. I've tried a lot of possible patchs with mkdocs==1.2.0, mkdocs==1.2.1 and mkdocs==1.2.2, but nothing worked.

It seems strange to me that changes are detected before the previous build is complete. Makes this any sense or is an implementation lack? As the maintainer of livereloading, could you provide some explanation about this behaviour @oprypin? Additionally, is possible to ignore certain files from being observed inside a observed directory? I suspect that #2529 could help, but determine *.ext files as hidden ones still seems like a hack. If so, I think that should be documented. Thanks!

---

Replicable example

git clone https://github.com/mondeja/mkdocs-mdpo-plugin.git
cd mkdocs-mdpo-plugin
python3 -m virtualenv venv
, venv/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install -e .[dev]
python3 -m mkdocs serve

[oprypin]

I'm developing a plugin that, essentially, do: from a file foo.md inside the root of the documentation directory, creates another file foo.ext

It is indeed a problem if you do that. It's not a good approach, and I have criticized it before and mentioned an alternative:

the exact described use case (writing files into docs dir during the build of that docs dir) is not a good approach and, I'd say, should not be catered towards.
There will be other issues, such as the file accidentally overwriting real files, or lingering there after an interruption and accidentally being committed, and probably more.
MkDocs' behavior isn't even wrong there.

Instead one can write to a separate temporary directory and add that file into the Files structure.
https://github.com/oprypin/mkdocs-gen-files/blob/08d6e91924af3a67031f30d925de12e893c5804b/mkdocs_gen_files/editor.py#L42-L47.

https://github.com/oprypin/mkdocs-gen-files/blob/08d6e91924af3a67031f30d925de12e893c5804b/mkdocs_gen_files/plugin.py#L27-L29
https://github.com/oprypin/mkdocs-gen-files/blob/08d6e91924af3a67031f30d925de12e893c5804b/mkdocs_gen_files/editor.py#L114-L115

To reiterate: don't programmatically write into docs_dir, instead write to a temporary location and add a File object referencing that location.

You can check out the code linked above -- do that instead of this code (with a mostly untrue comment ;)
https://github.com/mondeja/mkdocs-mdpo-plugin/blob/5dc80c340b436011063b21348679a4c8dd646763/mkdocs_mdpo_plugin/plugin.py#L311-L333

---

And then the described issue about livereload becomes invalid.

[mondeja]

Thank you for the detailed response and the great work overall, really appreciated 🙏