Skip to main content

How to exclude specific content when using GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is a powerful AI coding assistant and I couldn't miss it anymore. But there are times when you need to prevent it from accessing certain files or directories. Whether it's sensitive configuration files, proprietary code, or files that would add unnecessary noise to suggestions, exclusions help you maintain control over what Copilot sees.

Why exclude content?

You might want to exclude content from Copilot for several reasons:

  • Security and privacy: Keep API keys, passwords, and other secrets away from AI processing
  • Proprietary code: Protect sensitive business logic or algorithms
  • Noise reduction: Exclude generated files, dependencies, or build artifacts that don't help with suggestions
  • Performance: Reduce the context window size for faster suggestions

Reasons enough to spend some time configuring your content exclusions.

GitHub Copilot content exclusion settings

Content exclusion is a Copilot Business or Enterprise feature and can be configured at either repository-level or organization-level.

Repository-level exclusion

  • Navigate to your repository on GitHub
  • Go to Settings → Copilot
  • Add path patterns to exclude

Organization-level exclusion

Organization admins can set policies that apply across all repositories:

  • Go to your organization settings on GitHub
  • Navigate to Copilot settings

  • Configure content exclusion policies

 

These settings use glob patterns like:

  • **/secrets/** - Exclude all secrets directories
  • *.config - Exclude all config files
  • src/internal/** - Exclude internal source code

Sidenote: .aiignore file

The Jetbrains AI assistant supports the concept of an .aiignore file, similar to a .gitignore file.

I hope that we’ll see the same idea appear in VSCode when using Github Copilot.

More information

Content exclusion for GitHub Copilot - GitHub Docs

Excluding content from GitHub Copilot - GitHub Docs

Copilot content exclusion is now generally available in IDEs - GitHub Changelog

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more