How to Exclude Files from Publishing

Flowershow provides flexible options for controlling which files and directories are included in your published site. This is particularly useful when you want to:

• Publish only specific sections of your content
• Exclude private or work-in-progress content
• Hide archive posts

Using Site-Wide Settings

The primary way to control content filtering is through the contentInclude and contentExclude fields in your `config.json` file.

Excluding Content

To specify which files and directories should be excluded from your published site, use the contentExclude field.

For example, here we can exclude all of the drafts folder and a specific file private.md:

  "contentExclude": [
    "/drafts",
    "private.md"
  ]

Including Specific Content

If instead you want to publish only some files or directories, you can use the contentInclude field:

  "contentInclude": [
    "/blog",
    "README.md"
  ]

If this config field is set, no other files or directories will be published.

Combining include and exclude rules

You can use both contentInclude and contentExclude together for more fine-grained control. For example, if you want to publish your blog but exclude the archive directory:

  "contentInclude": [
    "README.md"        // Include the main README
    "/blog"            // and the blog directory
  ],
  "contentExclude": [
    "/blog/_archive"   // But exclude the _archive subdirectory
  ]

Remember that exclude rules always take precedence over include rules.

Using page-level control

Sometimes you might want to exclude just a specific page. You can do this by adding publish: false in the page's frontmatter:

---
title: "Draft Post"
publish: false
---

This page won't be published.

The publish: false setting takes precedence over site-wide settings in config.json. However, note that publish: true cannot be used to override site-wide exclusion rules or to selectively publish only specific pages.

Important notes

• If a path matches both contentInclude and contentExclude, the exclude rule takes precedence
• Paths are relative to your content root directory
• Directory paths will include all files and subdirectories within them
• Glob patterns are not supported at the moment