Copilot Chat does not work when content exclusion for other repository has been set

[sebbiKun]

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Hi,
We use content exclusion in our organisation to block some repositories which we do not want to allow to work with AI. The configuration looks like this:

...
https://gitlab.er.corscience.de/sreck/asf-3.7.3.git:
  - /**/* 

https://gitlab.er.corscience.de/sreck/fs_WinSim.git:
  - /**/*
...

For copilot autocompletion this works like intended:

• on blocked repository autocompletion is disabled
• all other repositories work without problem

However, copilot chat does not work any more. I looked at the debug log and found the following:

2025-05-22 09:59:18.868 [debug] File /home/sreck/checkout/chair-daemon/src/chaircontroller.h is ignored by content exclusion rule /**/*
even though there is no content exclusion rule for the active repository.

As I said auto completion works as intended so our content exclusion rules seem to be correct.
When I remove the rules Copilot Chat works again.

Is there anything I am missing? Do autocompletion and chat use a different parsing for the rules?

Thanks for your time

[Akash1134]

Hi @sebbiKun,

Thank you for reporting this issue with GitHub Copilot Chat not working when content exclusion is configured for other repositories.

Based on your description, it appears that while Copilot autocompletion correctly respects your content exclusion rules (blocking only the specified repositories while allowing other repositories to work normally), Copilot Chat is being incorrectly blocked across all repositories.

The debug log you shared is particularly helpful, as it shows Copilot Chat is incorrectly applying the exclusion rule /**/* to files in your chair-daemon repository even though you haven't set any content exclusion rules for this repository:

2025-05-22 09:59:18.868 [debug] File /home/sreck/checkout/chair-daemon/src/chaircontroller.h is ignored by content exclusion rule /**/*

This appears to be a bug in how Copilot Chat interprets content exclusion rules compared to the autocompletion feature. The two features might be using different parsing mechanisms for the exclusion rules.

I've documented this issue and will escalate it to our engineering team for investigation. While we work on a fix, you could try the following workaround:

1. Temporarily remove the content exclusion rules when you need to use Copilot Chat
2. Make your content exclusion rules more specific (if possible) to see if that helps Copilot Chat correctly interpret them

We appreciate your patience while we investigate this issue. If you discover any additional information or a workaround, please let us know in this discussion thread.

Thank you for your detailed report which will help us improve GitHub Copilot.

Best regards,

[sebbiKun]

We were able to solve the problem.

It seemed like copilot chat took the rules of a mirror repo although the file opened was not within this repo:
https://gitlab.er.xxx.de/mirror/c-cxx/vcpkg.git

As this repo was within the content exclusion rules, chat was not working.

We removed the mirror repo from content exclusion and now chat is working again.

[tw-svc-digital-infrastructure]

@sebbiKun Where can you find the debug logs ?

[sebbiKun]

@tw-svc-digital-infrastructure In VScode you can select GutHub Copilot Chat as output. When you set LogLevel to Trace you get pretty detailed output on what is going on

[tw-svc-digital-infrastructure]

@sebbiKun How about in IntelliJ ?

[tw-svc-digital-infrastructure]

When I am creating an exclusion to not allow any type of file in an organisation to be read by Github copilot, it doesn't work. I am still able to see the auto complete icon enabled and also the Github copilot chat is able to read it. The code is inside a branch. The exclusion code is as below:

https://github.com/testorg/testrepo.git:

• /**/src/main/copilotignore/*

Any help to resolve this will be very helpful.
@Akash1134 @sebbiKun