allow wildcards for externals

[Ventajou]

I use Webpack as a second pass to handle things such as turning SVGs into React components, importing AngularJS HTML templates and simply placing the assets exactly where I want them. In order to do that right now I have a script that builds a list of all the files that should be treated as external by esbuild because it seems to only accept absolute paths. This adds to the overhead of running Webpack...

Would it be possible to support wildcards (or even regular expressions) to specify externals?

[zmitry]

I did similar approach but I had to move all the svgs and css to specific folder which I could exclude.

[Ventajou]

I can't have everything in a single folder unfortunately.

My current approach is actually to run esbuild twice:

• the first time I parse all the errors for unsupported file extensions and unresolvable modules and add them to the list of externals.
• the second time is the actual build, using the externals from the first run.

This is still way faster and more accurate than any npm library I tried to get hold of the file dependency tree of my project...

[nettybun]

Does a wildcard regex as done here #420 (comment) resolve this? This is what I've been doing to have wildcard externals

[evanw]

FWIW you can do this as a plugin pretty easily. The plugin API is documented here: https://esbuild.github.io/plugins/.

[Ventajou]

Thanks, I'll close this. Been too busy to get into the plugins but now that they're there this will no longer be needed

[evanw]

The latest release allows you to use a single * wildcard for externals such as --external:*.png or --external:/assets/*. You can still write a quick plugin if you need something super custom but hopefully wildcards can solve for common cases without needing to write a plugin.