Can include-pattern be made to work at the ruleset level?

[adrienne]

As it is, it's tricky to debug certain codebase structures. In my case, i have the following:

/app   <-- should be checked
/vendor
   /foo    <-- should NOT be checked
   /bar    <-- should NOT be checked
   /baz    <-- should NOT be checked
   /mypackage   <-- SHOULD be checked
   /quux   <-- should NOT be checked

What I'd really like to be able to do is something like this:

<ruleset>
    <exclude-pattern>/vendor/*</exclude-pattern>
    <include-pattern>/vendor/mypackage/*</include-pattern>

    …
</ruleset>

[jrfnl]

@adrienne Have you tried this ?

<ruleset>
    <file>/app/</file>
    <file>/vendor/mypackage/</file>

    …
</ruleset>

[kanlukasz]

I second this 👍 !
It would be very useful.

In the meantime, you can try to achieve it with regex

For a structure like:

/app/                    <-- should be checked
/vendor/                 <-- should NOT be checked
/vendor/foo/             <-- should NOT be checked
/vendor/bar/             <-- should NOT be checked
/vendor/baz/             <-- should NOT be checked
/vendor/mypackage/       <-- should be checked
/vendor/quux/            <-- should NOT be checked

Something like this should work (negative expression):

<exclude-pattern type="relative">^(?!/app|/vendor/mypackage).+</exclude-pattern>

Live example:
https://regex101.com/r/Vup7gX/1

Another use case:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70289238/how-to-exclude-everything-except-some-directories-from-php-code-sniffer-inspecti

[jrfnl]

Even though the feature requested (include something which previously excluded) is not available, the general principle of what was requested is already achievable by setting the configuration up either with more specific <file> directives or more specific exclude patterns.

With this in mind, I'm marking this as a candidate for closure.