Allow initializing non-empty directory

[Kinrany]

Description

When Vite finds files in the current directory, it offers no option to ignore existing files even when they are completely irrelevant, like a shell.nix file used to install Node.

Suggested solution

There should be an extra option: to keep the files and continue anyway.

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

Validations

• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that request the same feature to avoid creating a duplicate.

[fi3ework]

Isolated irrelevant will not be processed by Vite. Could you provide a repro to demonstrate your issue?

[github-actions]

Hello @Kinrany. Please provide a minimal reproduction using a GitHub repository or StackBlitz. Issues marked with need reproduction will be closed if they have no activity within 3 days.

[Kinrany]

A repo with an empty file named shell.nix in the directory does this, doesn't it? I can make one, but there's not a lot to reproduce.

[fi3ework]

made a repro https://stackblitz.com/edit/vitejs-vite-x2aaj6?file=shell.nix&terminal=dev and didn't see anything wrong. Could you describe it in more detail?

[Kinrany]

Sorry, I did miss a part. Initialization is not done by Vite itself.

From Getting Started > Scaffolding Your First Vite Project:

With NPM:

npm create vite@latest

So here's what it looks like when the directory is completely empty (no package.json, nothing) save for a single shell.nix file:

❯ npm create vite@latest
success Install finished in 1.131s

✔ Project name: … .
✔ Current directory is not empty. Remove existing files and continue? … no
✖ Operation cancelled

We chose . as the project name, which makes it initialize a project in the current directory. It detects that the directory isn't empty and gives us a choice between deleting everything and aborting initialization.

The suggestion is to add "ignore existing files and continue" as the third option.

[ze]

+1 to this. I have a build system that wraps around NPM where I need to have a specified build file. From that build file, I have my npm config which allows me to run commands like tool create vite@latest. However, I can't do this because the directory is not empty due to that one build file.