serve export overwrites html files without warning

[rmetzler]

I had a Compass project that I converted into a Serve project. This procedure left an index.html file inside the public folder.

When I start serve export it seems like it first renders everything to the target folder and then copies the public folder into target overwriting existing files inside the target folder.

I think there are several methods how to deal with this.

1. the most simple approach would be to change the order of these two tasks
2. there should be a warning whenever an existing file is overwritten
3. there should be an interactive query for the user: "Overwrite? [Yn]"

I guess there are several other methods more for handling this problem. I would vote for 1 and could provide a patch if needed. Please tell me what you think.

[jlong]

I think this is the expected behavior. On a web server this would fail silently too because files in public would be served instead of files from the app. Or am I missing something?

[rmetzler]

When I go to http://localhost:4000/ serve shows views/index.html.erb and not public/index.html
After exporting export/index.html is the same as public/index.html. It's just a little bit inconsistent and it fails silently.

[jlong]

Good point. :)

I think I can switch this around for Serve. Let me look into it.

[jlong]

There's not an easy way to do this. I'd have to rewrite the Rack directory indexing stuff... Hrmmm...

[rmetzler]

I didn't test it, but I would expect if you move line 21 of https://github.com/jlong/serve/blob/master/lib/serve/export.rb to the start
of the method it should work.

[jlong]

That's true, but I want it to work that way. What I would like to do is get Serve to function the other way so that it mimics the functionality of both export and a normal Ruby deployment.

[ntalbott]

So the way you want it to work is that serve first renders the .html file, and only processes the template if the .html file doesn't exist?

[jlong]

Right, just like a regular Rack app.

[jlong]

Files in public should be served first, then if those URLs don't exist Serve should check the views directory.

[ntalbott]

Got it - will see what I can do about that.