Is there a way to ignore watching a single directory while running pants (place to keep docker volumes to preserve state).

If you set that, make sure to use

pants_ignore.add = ["path/to/dir"]

(note

.add

) not

pants_ignore = ["path/to/dir"]

. The second one overwrites the default which is usually not what you want for that option: https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/options#addremove-semantics