Exclude few folders in one filter

[oleksandr-kinship]

Hey, have repo that include two folders, for which I don't want to run some steps, tried following:

      - uses: dorny/paths-filter@v2
        id: changes
        with:
          filters: |
            ga:
              - '!.github/**'
            infra:
              - '!infrastructure/**'
            ga-infra:
              - '!.github/**'
              - '!infrastructure/**'`

Got this results:

Results:
Filter ga = true
  Matching files:
  infrastructure/src/resources/liquibase.ts [modified]
  src/main/java/com/.../file.java [modified]
Filter infra = true
  Matching files:
  .github/workflows/document_tests.yml [modified]
  src/main/java/com/.../file.java [modified] [modified]
Filter ga-infra = true
  Matching files:
  .github/workflows/document_tests.yml [modified]
  infrastructure/src/resources/liquibase.ts [modified]
  src/main/java/com/.../file.java [modified] [modified]

ga and infra looks good, expected that some folders not match, but in ga-infra I expected to see only src/main/java/com/.../file.java because other excluded
Can you point me what I did wrong or this not possible to implement, tried to read picomatch not get answers ..

[y-takebe]

@oleksandr-kinship

I had the same problem recently, but it seems that the negation operator is not supported.
Please also check the following related issue

• exclude files or dir #106
• Proposing v3.0.0 with updates and new features #151

I'd be happy if it's the same as GitHub's paths.

[oleksandr-kinship]

@oleksandr-kinship

I had the same problem recently, but it seems that the negation operator is not supported. Please also check the following related issue

• exclude files or dir #106
• Proposing v3.0.0 with updates and new features #151

I'd be happy if it's the same as GitHub's paths.

Thanks, it works for single rule but not in combination..
so I was tried another action, for me in general it's less comfortable, but at least it works fine so far,
here is example

      - name: Get changes
        uses: tj-actions/changed-files@v38
        id: changes
        with:
          files_yaml: |
            non-infra:
              - '!.github/**'
              - '!infrastructure/**'
              
      - name: Log non-infra changes
        shell: bash
        run: |
          echo "Is there changes for non-infra: ${{ steps.changes.outputs.non-infra_any_changed}}"
          echo "List of all non-infra changed files: ${{ steps.changes.outputs.non-infra_all_changed_files }}"

[Qix-]

It appears that !foo is returning a list of files from the entire folder that do not match foo, instead of culling the existing filepaths from other lines. The underlying minimatch/picomatch libs are working as expected.

In our case, our filter was previously

- 'app-*/**'
- '!app-ui/**'

but I'm pretty sure that resulted in a union of:

• everything in app-*/** (including app-ui)
• plus everything that didn't match `app-ui/**

resulting in a file list that includes everything in the folder as triggering a rebuild.

Instead, we changed to

- 'app-!(ui)/**'

which is what we wanted. That syntax is described on picomatch's docs, which is what this action uses.

---

Quick other note: make sure to put the strings in quotes since YAML treats *, ! and & and whatnot as special characters (anchors, tags, etc.)