feat: Do a better job detecting which files should be included

[nealrichardson]

This gets me every time. If I don't have a simple single-file app.py, I try publishing and see that e.g. my css file was not included. Can we try to inspect the entrypoint file and see what files it references, or some other heuristic, to make a better guess about which files should be uploaded? Or default to including everything that's not a dotfile, or not in gitignore, or something? The current default is not awesome.

[jonkeane]

One piece of prior art: RStudio+the publish button uses a combination of quarto inspect and rmarkdown::find_external_resources() (mentioned in more detail in #2594 (comment), though that issue + the PR that closed it didn't implement that). It's not perfect, but it is far more delightful than our current state.

[nealrichardson]

One piece of prior art: RStudio+the publish button uses a combination of quarto inspect and rmarkdown::find_external_resources() (mentioned in more detail in #2594 (comment), though that issue + the PR that closed it didn't implement that). It's not perfect, but it is far more delightful than our current state.

That's a start but doesn't help with what seems to be my main use case these days: random Python ASGI apps.

[jonkeane]

I suspected, but hadn't actually dug to see if it was true, that this was looking for strings that matched files, and indeed:

https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/blob/03e907abbe4e8bbe793431f8a037f22af67917fe/R/html_resources.R#L375-L397

That would be easy enough logic to copy (not just for R, but for Python too). Though there's a bit more in python (e.g. import filename_sans_ext wouldn't be covered, but we already do the opposite of this in the publisher when scanning for dependencies:

publisher/internal/inspect/dependencies/pydeps/project_imports.go

Lines 70 to 76 in 15389d9

	// Remove references to local .py files or packages
	dirExists, err := path.Dir().Join(string(name)).Exists()
	if err == nil && dirExists {
	return true
	}
	fileExists, err := path.Dir().Join(string(name) + ".py").Exists()
	return err == nil && fileExists

[karawoo]

For triaging purposes, are you able to share a reprex and/or more details on the types of applications you run into this with? The publisher's detection capabilities differ depending on app type so it would help to have that.

[nealrichardson]

One example is a Shiny (python) app that has a CSS file, like posit-dev/connect-extensions#317

Another one I've hit in the past is publishing a Quarto document that has extensions (and potentially a CSS file), but they don't get automatically selected.