Configuration Guide

#.astwire.toml

Place this file at your project root (or any ancestor directory of your run — astwire searches upward for it):

[general]
format = "llm"
strip_waste = true
show_tree = true
output = "context.xml"

[targeting]
languages = ["python", "javascript", "go"]
skip = [
    "tests/**",
    "migrations/**",
    "docs/**",
]

[ai]
max_tokens = 4000

Every value here maps to a CLI flag, and CLI flags always win when both are supplied:

general.show_tree has no CLI flag — it's config-only, controlling whether Markdown output includes the ## Project Structure ASCII tree.

For the full field-by-field contract (types, defaults, coercion behavior), see ../api/configuration.md.

#Typical use: excluding noise from a default (non -i) run

[targeting]
skip = [
    "tests/",
    "migrations/",
    "*.pyc",
    "__pycache__/",
]

This is the built-in default if you don't supply [targeting] at all. Override it when your project has additional generated or vendored directories to exclude:

[targeting]
skip = [
    "tests/",
    "migrations/",
    "*.pyc",
    "__pycache__/",
    "vendor/",
    "static/",
]

skip (and .gitignore/.astwireignore) apply whether or not -i/--resolve-imports is set: expand_local_imports() checks every resolved import target against the same skip/ignore rules as a plain target walk, and excludes it if either would — per SPEC-1.0.md §5, skip/ignore win over the import graph, not the other way around. -i additionally hard-denies vendor-style dirnames (node_modules/, vendor/, .venv/, etc.) regardless of skip/.gitignore.

#Typical use: always bundling as compact LLM-XML with a token ceiling

[general]
format = "llm"
strip_waste = true

[ai]
max_tokens = 8000

Now astwire src/ -i alone produces token-bounded, whitespace-stripped, XML-formatted partitions without repeating -f llm --strip-waste --max-tokens 8000 on every invocation.

#.astwireignore

A sibling file to .gitignore, using the same pattern syntax, consumed via IgnoreEngine by both the default target-resolution path and -i's import expansion. Use it for files you want astwire to skip but don't want to add to your actual .gitignore (for example, generated context bundles you don't want astwire to re-bundle on a later run):

# .astwireignore
context.md
context_part_*.md
*.astwire-cache

.astwireignore and .gitignore are both honored, per-directory, at every level of the tree being walked — not just at the project root.

#Precedence, end to end

CLI flags
   │  (always win when set)
   ▼
.astwire.toml  [general] / [targeting] / [ai]
   │  (used when the corresponding flag is omitted)
   ▼
astwireConfig defaults
   format=llm, strip_waste=False, skeleton=False,
   show_tree=True, max_tokens=None, output=context.xml,
   languages=None, skip=[tests/, migrations/, *.pyc, __pycache__/]

#Why configuration lives in the project, not the user's home directory

Unlike some developer tools, astwire's config is project-scoped (.astwire.toml discovered by walking up from the target), not machine-scoped under $HOME. This keeps a team's bundling defaults (skip patterns, preferred format, token ceiling) in version control alongside the code they apply to.