Stale output

drzl generate writes a manifest of the files it produced, at .drzl/manifest.json. The next run compares against it and tells you about files a previous run wrote that this one did not.

Why it exists

A generator writes the tables it finds and leaves everything else alone. Rename a table, or delete one, and the file for the old name stays where it was. It still compiles, it still exports a schema, and it describes a table your database does not have. Nothing reported it, because nothing knew DRZL had written it.

drzl generate: 1 file(s) written by a previous run were not written by this one, and are still on
disk: src/generated/zod/posts.zod.ts. That usually means a table was renamed or removed. Delete them
with `drzl generate --prune`, which removes only files a previous run recorded writing.

Why a manifest rather than a glob

The manifest is what makes deleting safe, and that is the whole point of it.

An output directory is a place you also keep hand-written files, barrels you edited, and the output of other tools. A generator that deleted "everything that looks generated" would eventually delete something a person wrote. Deleting only what a previous run recorded writing cannot.

--prune is bounded by that record, and refuses any path that climbs out of the project root, since the manifest is an ordinary file somebody can edit.

What is in it

{
  "version": 1,
  "files": ["src/generated/zod/index.ts", "src/generated/zod/users.zod.ts"]
}

Paths relative to the project root, forward slashes, sorted. No timestamp and no checksum, deliberately: a timestamp would rewrite the file on every run and put noise in every commit, and a checksum answers a question --check already answers better by comparing the content it just produced.

Commit it. It is small, it diffs cleanly when a table is added, and its whole value is being there on the next run.

What does not touch it

--check and --dry-run read the manifest and report against it, and never write it. Recording a run that wrote nothing would tell the next one that every file is stale, and offering to delete the whole output because somebody ran --check is the worst thing this could do.

A missing, truncated or unreadable manifest means "no record", never an error. A generator that refused to run because its own bookkeeping file was malformed would be a worse tool than one that quietly rebuilds it.

One thing worth knowing

A stale file that is still on disk stays in the manifest until it is pruned or deleted. Recording only what the run wrote would lose it after exactly one run: the warning would fire once and then never again, and --prune would find nothing, because by the time you ran it the record would be gone.