Clearing out output folder (usually dist)

[padcom]

I like the fact that Vite automatically can clear the project's build-time artifacts. It makes it much more predictable what's going to be located inside of the dist folder.

I am wondering if there could be a switch that will do the clearing before anything else happens. At the moment Vite waits until it is ready to generate the output and before writing anything to the dist it clears it out. This makes timing when the folder will be cleared unpredictable.

I have this other tool called mrdr (pronounced mordor, like from LOTR) that is capable of building not only the selected workspace of a monorepo, but also knows which packages the given one depends on and builds those first. Since mrdr uses as much of the configuration already included in package.json of the project in question it uses the "exports" section to figure out what artifacts are expected to be produced when the project is built and can automatically await their creation.

The problem is, those artifacts are there until much later in the build before they are removed. For that reason it'd be awesome if there would be a configuration option that would make deleting the contents of dist the first step of the build.

Do you think it'd be possible to add to the next version of Vite?

[padcom]

Here's some rationale about why mrdr was created:

https://dev.to/padcom/mrdr-is-born-from-hell-1i47