Ignore files/folders in pull request changes

[manoadamro]

I'm loving the file tree view in pull requests, it's incredibly useful! I do have one suggestion for a possible improvement.

In our monorepo, we have a /docs folder that contains the generated files needed for our pages deployment.
When a pull request triggers particular actions, those actions result in extra commits being pushed to the triggering branch. This means that each pull request will contain at least 60+ changed files, almost all of which are auto-generated by an action.

It would be handy to have a sort of .gitignore equivalent in the .github folder (eg: .diff-ignore or something) to define files or folders (using the same syntax as .gitignore) that are omitted from the changed files tree, as well as the changed files count. Perhaps there could be a message or note somewhere on the UI to note that x files are omitted due to these rules to make that clear.

Alternatively, instead of completely omitting them, they could be "switched off" with a checkbox, where toggling the checkbox would toggle visibility of the item in the files tree (and all children down the hierarchy if it is a folder). Perhaps the ignore file could be used to define files or folders that are "switched off" by default in this case.

This would allow trunk-based development heavily automated in monorepos without making pull requests bigger than what is actually intended for review.

[Marmok-csgo]

In our monorepo, we have a /docs folder that contains the generated files needed for our pages deployment.
When a pull request triggers particular actions, those actions result in extra commits being pushed to the triggering branch. This means that each pull request will contain at least 60+ changed files, almost all of which are auto-generated by an action.

[Strernd]

Just not rendering the files with linguist-generated isn't doing it for us. Our file tree is oftentimes 70/75 files generated, and we don't have an option to exclude them.

[yuriy-yarosh]

We do consider this official recommendation Customizing how changed files appear on GitHub to be Broken.

We store our .yarn/cache for yarn4 in our repo, and not being able to hide vendored deps is inconvenient, to say the least.

[frbvianna]

In addition to what @manoadamro described, it would also be useful if those files/folders hidden from the PR file tree did not count toward the total diff line count.

For instance, in the Go ecosystem, it is not uncommon to have dependencies in a vendor folder. It may be that a new feature requires updating one of those dependencies, then all of the updated vendor files are shown in the PR file tree, possibly lagging the review navigation even when the file diffs are not rendered.

Then the actual feature may be comprised of 100 lines of code, but the PR shows something like +693,851 −10, fogging the actual stats.

[dynajoe]

We're having a similar issue with go vendor directory. Many thousands of lines changed showing up and slow loading diffs in browser.

Shouldn't creating .gitattributes with these contents work?

vendor/** linguist-generated

[lewisl9029]

I'd love to see an option added for generated files in the files filter dropdown that shows/hides all generated files marked by the linguist-generated directive in .gitattributes:

Ideally there should also be a way to default it to unchecked (if it's not going to be the default to begin with).