exclude files from processing

when canvas-sak walks a directory — downloading submissions, uploading course content, bundling code for a similarity check — you usually don’t want everything in it. node_modules/, .git/, build output, and .DS_Store are noise at best and, in a moss submission, actively harmful: they swamp the real code and slow the comparison down.

ignore patterns use the same syntax as .gitignore, so you already know it.

two places to put patterns

per directory: canvas-sak-ignore.lst

drop a file named canvas-sak-ignore.lst in the directory you’re working in. one pattern per line; blank lines and lines starting with # are ignored:

# build output
build/
dist/
*.o

# editor and os cruft
.DS_Store
.idea/

# dependencies — never useful in a similarity check
node_modules/
venv/

this is the right place for anything specific to one assignment or one course.

everywhere: the [IGNORE] section of your config

for patterns you always want, add an [IGNORE] section to your canvas-sak config file (canvas-sak help-me-setup prints its location):

[IGNORE]
ds_store=.DS_Store
pycache=__pycache__/
node=node_modules/

each entry is name=pattern. the name on the left is just a label so you can tell them apart — only the pattern on the right is used.

patterns from both sources are combined; neither replaces the other.

pattern syntax

pattern	matches
*.log	any .log file — * does not cross directory separators
**/tmp	tmp at any depth
?	exactly one character
build/	the directory build and its contents — trailing / means directories only
!keep.log	un-ignores something an earlier pattern matched

negation with ! is evaluated in order, so put the exception after the rule it excepts:

*.log
!important.log

checking it works

ignore patterns apply to the commands that walk the filesystem — code-similarity, download-submissions, and the course-content commands. all of them default to a dry run, so you can see exactly which files would be included before anything happens:

canvas-sak code-similarity "CS 146" "Homework 1"

if a file you expected to be skipped shows up in that list, the pattern didn’t match — check for a stray leading /, or a missing trailing / on a directory pattern.