Question: Any way to skip unmodified files from being uploaded to server?

[markcellus]

Thanks for creating this package. I'm using it to upload files to my server when I'm deploying my site.

I've found that it takes longer and longer to deploy the files as the amount of files on my project grows. Is there a way to perhaps skip uploading files that are already on the server and that haven't changed? I'd imagine this would cut down on the files being uploaded and would make deployments a lot faster.

This may be out of the scope of the package, but just wanted to ask to see if anyone had any ideas or information on how they usually handle this case.

Thanks in advance!

[steelbrain]

It’s possible to build this capability into options.validate. Good idea!

I am open to building this as a first class feature but that has the problem of how do we determine what files have changes? Looking at size may be enough in some cases while other cases may require hashing entire file contents.

Thoughts?

[markcellus]

Node gives the last modified time of a file in the mtime of its f.Stat object returned from fs.stat(). It also gives other details about a file like its size, creation time, etc which could also be used for evaluating if a file has changed. The contents of the file can be read via fs.readFile, but I'd use that as a last resort since that could suffer from performance issues.

This does assume that the server is running Node though. Otherwise, I'm not sure how reading the file contents on the server could be done. But I guess this feature can be restricted to servers that are running node?