Discovery arguments

Discovery arguments determine which locations should be checked if they contain packages. For each argument the name in brackets indicates which package contributes it.

--paths [PATH [PATH …]] [colcon-core]

The (non recursive) paths to check for a package. Use shell wildcards (e.g. src/*) to select all direct subdirectories of src.

--base-paths [PATH [PATH …]] [colcon-recursive-crawl]

The base paths to recursively crawl for packages. The default value is .. In a workspace root the subdirectories other than src (commonly build, install, log) contain a COLCON_IGNORE marker file which causes them to be ignored.

--metas [PATH [PATH …]] [colcon-metadata]

The directories containing a colcon.meta file or paths to arbitrary files containing the same meta information. The default value is ./colcon.meta.

--ignore-user-meta [colcon-metadata]

Ignore *.meta files in the configuration directory $COLCON_HOME/metadata/.

--packages-ignore [PKG_NAME [PKG_NAME …]] [colcon-package-selection]

Ignore packages by name as if they were not discovered. In contrast to being skipped using package selection arguments, ignored packages aren’t considered in the dependency graph.

--packages-ignore-regex [PATTERN [PATTERN …]] [colcon-package-selection]

Ignore packages where any of the patterns match the package name. In contrast to being skipped using package selection arguments, ignored packages aren’t considered in the dependency graph.