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CI Artifacts: exclude paths

Problem to solve

Without ability to exclude folders from an artifact, the path to every folder must be explicitly referenced which is difficult to maintain.

Example: During my CI build I want to cache my whole build folder but pass only a subset of it as an artifact.

Intended users

  • Development Team Lead
  • Software Developer
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Systems Administrator

Proposal

  • Allow user to define excluded paths in the gitlab-ci.yml file. Something like:
build_job:
    stage: build
    cache:
        key: build_cache
        paths:
            - build/
    script:
        - mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake .. && make
    artifacts:
        paths:
            - build/
            - some/**/directories
        exclude:
            - build/dont-include-this-folder/
            - some/**/directories/*.txt

  • When a path has both an include and exclude specified, both conditions must be satisfied for the file to be included in artifacts, making it inconsequential the order is which the conditions are check.

  • Globbing is supported (globs and double star globs) since GitLab Runner is using https://github.com/bmatcuk/doublestar library.

  • Printing of the amount of excluded files based on an exclusion rule is supported: runner_artifacts_exclude

Links / references

Availability & Testing

  • Unit test changes
    • Feature requires new unit tests
    • Ensure existing behaviors are not compromised.
  • End-to-end test change
    • No end-to-end testing required
    • package-and-qa required - please trigger this job and it should pass in MR
Edited by Thao Yeager