Exclude rules are too greedy

[pdewouters]

I'm having trouble understanding the logic behind the exclude_string function.
For example, I added an exclude rule as cache/ thinking it would exclude any subdirectory named cache, but it actually excludes anything that has the pattern cache in it.

which was wrongly excluding some folders and files:

I think we need a separate case for fragments in the exclude_string function?

Currently, when a user excludes a folder or file via the admin, we use an absolute path, but the default excludes array are wildcard patterns.

[pdewouters]

I found these quite clear. Maybe we can use

 What are exclude patterns?

Patterns allow you to exclude parts of your repository from being deployed. You can exclude files or folders containing a certain word, extension and more.

Here are some example patterns

Exclude all files with the extension "txt":

**/*.txt

Exclude all files with the extension "txt" in the folder "folder1":

/folder1/*.txt

Exclude all files with the name test.pdf below the folder "hello" and any subfolder:

/hello/**/test.pdf

Exclude files or folders containing the word "name":

*name*

Exclude files containing the word "name" and the extension "txt":

*name*.txt

Exclude files or folders with name n?me, where ? can be any character:

n?me

Exclude all files or folders containing the word "beta":

**/*beta*

Exclude all files or folders containing the word "experiment" in the folder "folder1":

/folder1/*experiment*

Exclude all files or folders containing the word "develop" below the folder "hello" and any subfolder:

/hello/**/*develop*

[willmot]

Would be good to narrow this down to the specific issue with excludes.

I think it's that currently foo/ matches *foo/ when intuitively it should probably only match */foo/. That is it should match any folder called foo regardless of where it is instead of matching any path that contains *foo/ which is what currently happens?

[willmot]

Also we should prove this with Unit Tests as exclude rule matching is well tested, it's just that maybe the assumptions are wrong

[katmoody]

Does this seem like it would be fixed in an upcoming release, then, or or will it take more time to fully isolate @willmot? Have one person who loves using the plugin but keeps having a few files excluded, which makes it less convenient if they have to do a restore. I think you figured out the *dev file pattern was the one impacting them?

[willmot]

@katmoody it's not going to be resolved quickly unfortunately, they could work around the issue by removing the exclude rule for dev from the UI and then manually excluding it's absolute path using the HMBKP_EXCLUDES constant.

e.g.

define( 'HMBKP_EXCLUDES', 'absolute_path_to_dev' );

[katmoody]

@willmot - How do they remove the exclude rule for dev?

[willmot]

It's a rule they've added through the excludes page so should just be able to remove it like any other rule.

[katmoody]

But they didn't add any rules to the excludes page, at all? I thought this was a default rule you had in the plugin itself?

[willmot]

@katmoody I think we chatted about this in Slack, I double checked and the user you're referring to had definitely manually excluded dev which was then causing a file which happened to include dev in its filename to be excluded.

[sambulance]

Is this still an issue? It's in the Deployed pipeline - can we close?

[willmot]

I don't know why it's in the deployed pipeline, it's not been worked on and is an epic.

[katmoody]

Just a note - the excludes doesn't work when excluding from the admin either? Seems to exclude by filename still :(