Make managedPaths support globs/anymatch #12036

Feature request

With some setups (especially the ones making use of Yarn Workspaces), it is fairly common to use Webpack to apply some loaders to files located in node_modules (like a local package, or a module that needs to go through Babel, etc), and also watch changes happening in those files.

The problem with Webpack 5 is snapshot.managedPaths/cache.managedPaths only accepts an array of string representing a list of folders that "are not supposed to change" (that's my understanding of the feature).

So now, a solution is to just disable them:

{
  snapshot: { 
    managedPaths: []
}

...which I would not recommend at all, as I assume it would introduce some severe performances hits for the cache.

So, it would be great if we could have the following:

{
  snapshot: { 
    managedPaths: ['**node_modules/{!some-module,!or-another}/**/*']
  }
}

What is the expected behavior?

Nothing is expected, this is a proposal/requet.

What is motivation or use case for adding/changing the behavior?

cf. above.

How should this be implemented in your opinion?

It looks to me that using anymatch on managedPaths would not break anything. I have absolutely no knowledge of Webpack's internals, I may say something really stupid here.

Are you willing to work on this yourself?

If it receives the blessing of an official Webpack member, yes!