Feature request: configurable ignore-paths (and safelist editor server caches like ~/.vscode-server by default)

[NiveditJain]

Background

I ran dev-purge on my home directory and it deleted the out/ directory inside ~/.vscode-server/bin/<commit-hash>/, which broke my code command in WSL. The error after running:

Error: Cannot find module '/home/<user>/.vscode-server/bin/<hash>/out/server-cli.js'

Root cause

The VS Code Remote server installs a package.json at ~/.vscode-server/bin/<commit-hash>/package.json so it can resolve its own dependencies. The README says generic dirs like out, dist, build, target are only flagged inside actual projects (detected via marker files like package.json). But that detection is exactly what backfires here — the VS Code server bin has a package.json, so the directory gets classified as a project, and its out/ (which contains server-cli.js, server-main.js, bootstrap-fork.js, the bundled vs/ runtime, etc.) gets removed. The code command in WSL launches via:

"$ROOT/node" "$ROOT/out/server-cli.js" ...

so once out/ is gone, the CLI is broken until the server is re-provisioned by VS Code Remote.

This very likely affects sibling tools the same way (Cursor uses ~/.cursor-server, Windsurf uses ~/.windsurf-server, JetBrains Gateway uses ~/.cache/JetBrains/RemoteDev-*, etc. — they all ship a package.json/marker file alongside an out/ or dist/).

Feature request

Two things, ideally:

1. A user-configurable ignore/exclude list — flag(s) like --ignore <glob> (repeatable) and a config file equivalent (e.g. ~/.config/dev-purge/config.json with an ignore array). Globs should match against absolute paths so users can write ~/.vscode-server/** etc.

2. A built-in safelist of known editor server caches, applied by default but overridable. Suggested entries:

   • ~/.vscode-server/**
   • ~/.vscode-server-insiders/**
   • ~/.vscode-remote/**
   • ~/.cursor-server/**
   • ~/.windsurf-server/**
   • ~/.cache/JetBrains/RemoteDev-*/**

These directories are not user projects — they're machine-managed editor runtime installs that happen to contain marker files, and reclaiming a few hundred MB inside them isn't worth bricking the editor's remote command.

A related, smaller mitigation: when the project marker is package.json and the directory path is under a known editor-server root, skip it regardless of the user's other flags.

Happy to send a PR if there's interest and a preferred config format.

Repro

1. Set up VS Code Remote-WSL (or any setup that creates ~/.vscode-server/bin/<hash>/).
2. Run dev-purge -a (or any invocation that includes the build-artifacts category) over $HOME.
3. Observe ~/.vscode-server/bin/<hash>/out/ gets deleted.
4. code --version from inside WSL fails with Cannot find module '.../out/server-cli.js'.

Workaround for anyone hitting this now

Re-download the matching server tarball and extract just the out/ dir:

HASH=$(ls ~/.vscode-server/bin | head -1)
cd ~/.vscode-server/bin/$HASH
curl -sL -o /tmp/vscs.tgz "https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:$HASH/server-linux-x64/stable"
tar -xzf /tmp/vscs.tgz --strip-components=1 vscode-server-linux-x64/out
rm /tmp/vscs.tgz

[NiveditJain]

Quick follow-up after working through the full recovery — out/ is only part of what dev-purge removed. The bin dir was also missing node_modules/ (so the server crashed with Cannot find package 'cookie' imported from .../out/server-main.js), and a few bundled extensions under bin/<hash>/extensions/<name>/ lost their dist/ directories too. All of these have package.json siblings that trip the project-detection heuristic, so the same root cause hits every level of the tree.

Cleanest recovery (recommended)

Just delete the broken bin dir and let VS Code Remote-WSL reinstall it on next connect:

rm -rf ~/.vscode-server/bin
# then reconnect from VS Code on the host (Remote-WSL / Remote-SSH)

VS Code detects the missing/outdated install and downloads a fresh server automatically. This is what ended up working for me after manual extraction left some bundled extensions in a half-restored state.

Manual recovery (if reinstall isn't an option)

HASH=$(ls ~/.vscode-server/bin | head -1)
cd ~/.vscode-server/bin/$HASH
curl -sL -o /tmp/vscs.tgz "https://update.code.visualstudio.com/commit:$HASH/server-linux-x64/stable"
tar -xzf /tmp/vscs.tgz --strip-components=1
rm /tmp/vscs.tgz

(Tar overwrites identical files harmlessly and only fills in what's missing — won't disturb anything user-installed.)

One sharp edge worth flagging

If you're sitting inside ~/.vscode-server/bin/<hash>/... in any shell when VS Code's auto-updater kicks in, it deletes that directory out from under you and the next server launch crashes with getcwd() failed / uv_cwd: ENOENT. Always recover from outside the .vscode-server tree (or restart the WSL distro: wsl --terminate <distro>).

Reinforces the safelist proposal

The editor-server tree is full of package.json-marked subdirectories with node_modules/out/dist siblings — bundled extensions inside bin/<hash>/extensions/<name>/ and user extensions under ~/.vscode-server/extensions/<name>/ follow the same shape. Per-pattern excludes won't be enough; the only safe default is to skip the ~/.vscode-server*, ~/.cursor-server*, ~/.windsurf-server*, ~/.cache/JetBrains/RemoteDev-* roots entirely.