GitLab CI/CD artifact exclude not working

Question

the artifact section of my .gitlab-ci.yml file is:

  script:
    - echo "creating artifact"    
  artifacts:
    name: "<name of my project>"
    paths:
      - $CI_PROJECT_DIR
    exclude:
      - $CI_PROJECT_DIR/deploy/*
      - $CI_PROJECT_DIR/git/*

However, the files i want to be excluded are still included; both the deploy folder and the .git folder and their contents are present when I download the artifact from git. I also get this warning when running the artifact stage of my pipeline, despite git being excluded: WARNING: Part of .git directory is on the list of files to archive . I have tried changing it from $CI_PROJECT_DIR/git/* to $CI_PROJECT_DIR/.git/*, but this makes the artifact even larger (so large that the pipeline fails and i can't download the artifact).

I have also tried removing the /* from the filepaths and also changing it to /**/*, but neither solved the issue. One very strage thing is that sometimes the artifact is smaller with the first path ending, and sometimes it is smaller when it is removed.

How can i resolve this so that the correct files are excluded and the artifact is not as large? Or is there anything else I can do to make the artifact smaller?

Answer 1

Both the folder itself and its content must be excluded. Only this worked for me:

artifacts:
  paths:
    - ./
  exclude:
    - .git
    - .git/**/*

The result from GitLab job log:

...
Uploading artifacts...
./: found 9924 matching files and directories      
.git: excluded 1 files                             
.git/**/*: excluded 31 files
...

Answer 2

I had the same issue. I discovered that the paths in exclude need to be relative to $CI_PROJECT_DIR so you have to remove that part from the exclude path.

The final working way is:

  script:
    - echo "creating artifact"    
  artifacts:
    name: "<name of my project>"
    paths:
      - $CI_PROJECT_DIR
    exclude:
      - deploy/**/*
      - .git/**/*