About content exclusion for Copilot
You can use content exclusion to configure Copilot to ignore certain files. When you exclude content from Copilot:
- Code completion will not be available in the affected files.
- The content in affected files will not inform code completion suggestions in other files.
- The content in affected files will not inform GitHub Copilot Chat's responses.
- Affected files will not be reviewed in a Copilot code review.
Who can configure content exclusion
Repository administrators, organization owners, and enterprise owners can configure content exclusion.
-
Repository administrators can exclude content for their own repositories. This affects any Copilot users in the enterprise working within those specific repositories.
-
Organization owners can exclude content for users assigned a Copilot seat through their organization.
-
Enterprise owners can apply exclusion rules to all Copilot users in the enterprise.
Availability of content exclusion
The Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise plans provide the following level of support for content exclusion.
| Tool | Code completion support | Copilot Chat support |
|---|---|---|
| Visual Studio | ||
| Visual Studio Code | ||
| JetBrains IDEs | ||
| Vim/Neovim | Not applicable | |
| Xcode | ||
| Eclipse | ||
| Azure Data Studio | Not applicable | |
| The GitHub website | Not applicable | |
| GitHub Mobile | Not applicable |
Content exclusions also apply to Copilot code review on the GitHub website.
Note
- Content exclusion is in public preview on the GitHub website and in GitHub Mobile and is subject to change.
- Content exclusion is currently not supported in Edit and Agent modes of Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code.
Limitations of content exclusion
It's possible that Copilot may use semantic information from an excluded file if the information is provided by the IDE indirectly. Examples of such content include type information and hover-over definitions for symbols used in code, as well as general project properties such as build configuration information.
Currently, content exclusions do not apply to symbolic links (symlinks).
Data sent to GitHub
After you configure content exclusion, the client (for example, the Copilot extension for VS Code) sends the current repository URL to the GitHub server so that the server can return the correct policy to the client. These URLs are not logged anywhere.