Allow recursive runs to exclude subpaths and/or the top-level path

[whoracle]

What problem are you facing?

We currently have X repositories with Y modules in them (and the modules themselves pull "real" modules via a private module registry in gitlab). I want to force README generation in each module via pre-commit, but I want to leave the repo root README alone (since there's no tf files in there anyways), but I only want to have one unified terraform-docs.yml in each repository.

Currently, if I run terraform-docs -c .terraform-docs.yml . in the repo root, my main README gets modified alongside the module README files. If I start one level deeper with e.g. terraform-docs -c .terraform-docs.yml subscriptions, then I get a README in subscriptions, which I also don't want.

Example repo structure:

~/terraform/azure
├───subscriptions
│       │
│       ├───my_dev_sub
│       │        ├───main.tf
│       │        ├───more_files.tf
│       │        ├───terragrunt.hcl
│       │        └───README.md
│       │
│       ├───my_staging_sub
│       │        ├───main.tf
│       │        ├───more_files.tf
│       │        ├───terragrunt.hcl
│       │        └───README.md
│       │
│       └───my_prod_sub
│                ├───main.tf
│                ├───more_files.tf
│                ├───terragrunt.hcl
│                └───README.md
|
├───.terraform-docs.yml
├───terragrunt.hcl
└───README.md

How could terraform-docs help solve your problem?

I have two ideas for a solution:

• Let me specify which folders to exclude in .terraform-docs.yml in the recursive tree or a global .terraform-docs-ignore file in the repo root
• make terraform-docs ignore all directories that contain a .terraform-docs-ignore file in them (can be empty)
  For my specific use case I don't have a strong preference either way, since I only want to exclude a single location (the top level), but a more flexible approach would maybe be advised for people who want to ignore more than one path.

Kind Regards

[kraduk]

sub optimal, but just .gitignore those files

[rob-borg]

As an addition I would like to specify which submodules to exclude from doc generation completely during a recursive generation

[martin-reich]

As mentioned in #613:
You can use a workaround:

terraform-docs markdown --output-mode replace --output-file README.md --recursive --recursive-path ../ ./modules/name-of-module