For those Sculpin users out there Matthias Noback has posted a tip showing how to make the tool skip certain sources so it's not included in the build. This is useful for removing files that may not be needed in the final result. In his case, he wanted to slim down his Docker image and only include exactly what was needed for the site it hosts.

Whenever I run the Sculpin generate command to generate a new version of the static website that is this blog, I notice there are a lot of useless files that get copied from the project's source/ directory to the project's output/ directory. All the files in the output/ directory will eventually get copied into a Docker image based on nginx (see also my blog series on Containerizing a static website with Docker). And since I'm on a hotel wifi now, I realized that now was the time to shave off any unnecessary weight from this Docker image.

After some searching around he found the best solution for his needs - a custom hook into Sculpin's own events system with a "before run" event. He includes the code he used to create a SkipSources event that uses pattern matches to exclude the requested sources. Then, using the fnmatch function he generated a listing of files to pass in to be skipped. After working up this solution, a bit more research also lead to another possible, more built-in way: the ignore configuration key that also uses pattern matching.