Arara rule for automatic compilation of all files in a directory tree

Question

I am currently using arara to give compilation rules for my .tex files. I have a lot of tikz/pgfplots made files which share common settings hosted in a header file, so that I can easily modify a setting, then recompile everything using a for loop e.g.

@FOR /R "rootdir" %%G in (.) DO (
@ Pushd %%G
@ for %%x in (*.tex) do arara "%%x"
@ Popd )
@pause

as I am on a windows machine.

However, this starts/stops arara a big bunch of times and throws very ugly logging to the terminal. So is there a rule or can one be written so that arara is only started once and compiles all files in a specified directory tree.

Answer 1

It's as easy¹ as writing an own rule using listFilesByExtensions (save this as all.yaml next to your files):

!config
identifier: all
name: All TeX files
commands:
- name: All
  command: >
    @{
        a = [];
        foreach(ref : listFilesByExtensions(".", ["tex"], true)) {
          a.add(getCommandWithWorkingDirectory(ref.parent, [command, ref.name]));
        }
        return a;
    }
arguments:
- identifier: command
  flag: >
    @{
      parameters.command
    }
  default: pdflatex

Then write an arararc.yaml like

!config
paths:
- ./

Your header.tex will then contain % arara: all and all TeX files within the directory tree will be compiled (sequentially). Please note that if you actually have your header.tex called header.tex it will be compiled as well. You could e.g. rename it to header.ltx to avoid it.

_{¹ Actually, the first draft of this rule had to be revised. Thanks to Paulo Cereda for providing an updated rule.}