Affected

Affected is a term to describe when a project or task is affected by a change in the environment (workspace). This is a core concept in moon, and is the basis for many of our features, such as task running, incremental builds, and more.

Change types

To start, there are 3 types of "sources" that can trigger an affected state: files, environment variables, and graph relations.

Files

A file is considered changed if it has been added, modified, deleted, renamed, moved, copied, so on and so forth. This state is determined by the version control system (VCS) in use, such as Git, Mercurial, or Subversion. For Git, this is determined by the git status command.

For a project, any changed file that is within the project folder (starts with the project source), triggers affected.

For a task, any changed file that is configured within the task's inputs triggers affected.

Environment variables

An environment variable is considered changed if it exists and is non-empty. This is determined by the presence of the variable in the environment, and its value.

For projects, they are not affected by environment variables.

For a task, any changed environment variable that is configured within the task's inputs triggers affected.

Graph relations

A relation is considered changed if a project or task that is depended on, or depends on, is affected by a changed file or environment variable. This is determined by the project and task graph, which is built from the workspace configuration.

For a project, affected dependency/dependent projects of the project (via dependsOn), or affected tasks within the project, triggers affected.

For a task, affected dependency/dependent tasks of the task (via deps) triggers affected.

info

This check is conditionally enabled. For moon query, it is always enabled. For exec-based commands, it is not enabled by default and the --include-relations flag must be passed.

Graph depth

When determining affected state based on graph relations, the depth of traversal can be configured with the --upstream (--dependencies) and --downstream (--dependents) options. These options can be set to one of the following values:

• none - Do not include any relations.
• direct - Include only direct relations.
• deep - Include all relations.

For exec-based commands, the default is --upstream=deep and --downstream=none, meaning all dependencies are included, but no dependents are included. For query and other commands, the default is none for both.