dotted-ignore

A Rust library and CLI utility for efficient directory walking with .ignore-style file exclusion — inspired by .gitignore behavior.

🚀 Overview

dotted-ignore provides a flexible and extendable way to recursively walk directories while respecting ignore rules scoped per directory, just like .gitignore. It supports:

• Per-directory .ignore files with scoped rules
• Powerful glob-based pattern matching
• Support for relative and recursive ignore patterns
• Easily customizable callback for processing matched files/directories

Whether you’re building a file watcher, backup tool, or any utility that needs fine-grained file filtering, dotted-ignore gives you the control you need.

⚙️ Features

• Mimics .gitignore scoped ignore behavior, supporting patterns like:
  • /target to ignore a folder only in the current scope
  • **/node_modules to ignore recursively everywhere
  • Relative patterns like ./build
• Efficient in-memory caching of ignore rules per directory
• Recursive walking with user-defined callback to process files/directories
• Easily extensible to support advanced features like negation and layered ignore files

📦 Installation

Add dotted-ignore to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
dotted-ignore = "0.1"

🛠 Usage

Example usage:

use dotted_ignore::walk_dir;

fn main() {
    let base_dir = std::env::current_dir().unwrap();

    walk_dir(base_dir.to_str().unwrap(), |entry| {
        let path = entry.path();
        if path.is_dir() {
            println!("Dir: {}", path.display());
        } else {
            println!("File: {}", path.display());
        }
    });
}

🤝 Contributing

I’m excited to grow this project into a fast, robust, and fully featured .ignore implementation.

If you want to contribute, your help is welcome with:

• Optimizations and performance improvements
• Supporting .ignore features like negation (!pattern)
• Adding tests and examples
• Bug fixes and documentation enhancements

Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests!

🔮 Roadmap

• Improve pattern parsing and add full .gitignore feature support
• Optimize performance with incremental parsing and caching
• Add CLI tool for standalone usage
• Support multi-platform path handling and Windows-style paths