Explicitly declare which pages should the Form Auto Detection run on

[donsbox]

Hi,

We have a quite a big site, around 70k pages. And the form auto detection feature is taking quite a long time to finish and many times it fails the build due to timing out.

So I was wondering if we have any way to declare which pages the detection should run on explicitly so it would hopefully quicken the process?

Thanks

[nathanmartin]

@donsbox This has been asked previously here:

Forms detection now off by default

Will it eventually be possible to specify specific pages with forms (so Netlify doesn’t need to scan every page for them)? Also, for a plain HTML/CSS with only vanilla JS (and then only for search) using an SSG (in my case Hugo), what kinds of options are there for contact forms (the only forms I have on any of my sites) that don’t involve a third-party service? If there are alternatives that would work in this scenario with only Netlify-based features (preferably with a light usage ‘Starter’ …

The answer was:

@kito

Good question. Right now there’s nothing in the roadmap for it but it’s a really good idea! I’ll create an issue internally to investigate this (but can’t promise anything!)

It was still not on the roadmap as of Sep 2024:

Forms detection now off by default

Straightforward change is a myth. As for discussions, there have been a few especially to improve forms support for SSR-pages, but currently there’s no concrete plan. So I don’t believe this would change anytime soon.

If I were you, I’d make plans around not having it anytime soon.

[luke]

Hi, @donsbox. There is another workaround. Only enable the forms auto detection once until the form handlers are created. Then disabled the forms auto detection for future builds. You would only need to enable it if the forms changed again in the future. If the form have not changed, the previously created form handlers will be used and forms detection can be skipped entirely.

Note, this would be a manual process where you would need to re-enable forms detection anytime the forms change. However, it would cut down time spent on forms detection for most builds where there are no changes to the forms.