Ephemeral Mode to easily integrate Darktable with IDEs

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
My feature request is related to web development.

Currently, I have to explicitly add images to Darktable. With many projects which each have constantly evolving lists of image assets, the Darktable database has to be kept up to date constantly by adding the new images to Darktable explicitly.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to have a way to start Darktable in an ephemeral mode that is easy to integrate with IDEs.

Ideally, you can start Darktable from the CLI pointing it to a directory and all the images are automatically indexed in this directory. The database can ephemerally remain in memory (or persisted in the project directory by passing the corresponding CLI flag) and information about the images are stored in the side-car XML files, where they can be loaded again at a later time.

By default, the images would be exported to a location right next to the original image or to a templated location that is provided via CLI flag.

Alternatives
Currently, the workaround is to open Darktable with in-memory database and adding the images, then manually configuring export paths.

No files or tests are named. Start at the CLI entry point and review the existing in-memory database, sidecar XML, image indexing, and export-path behavior; done means a directory can be opened ephemerally with configurable persistence and export locations.