issues.exclude-dirs not behaving as expected

[gakesson]

Welcome

• Yes, I'm using a binary release within 2 latest releases. Only such installations are supported.
• Yes, I've searched similar issues on GitHub and didn't find any.
• Yes, I've read the typecheck section of the FAQ.
• Yes, I've tried with the standalone linter if available (e.g., gocritic, go vet, etc.).
• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

How did you install golangci-lint?

Official binary

Description of the problem

The issues.exclude-dirs configuration is ignored in case lint failure is due to typecheck linter.
This is a bit unintuitive that even explicitly excluded directories are failing a specific linter, and after some digging in the golangci-lint code it seems it is related to this PR.

This is a bit problematic when there is CI/CD tasks populate code that does not pass this linter, in build/CI/CD related directories not intended to be linted. Only workaround I have right now is to explicitly point out the directories that should be linted, which is a bit tedious.

Is this considered a bug or is it possible to have another config-option to instruct golangci-lint to not use typecheck linter even in certain directories?

Version of golangci-lint

$ golangci-lint --version
golangci-lint has version 1.64.4 built with go1.24.0 from 04aec4f7 on 2025-02-12T21:58:21Z

Configuration

run:
  tests: false
  timeout: 5m
issues:
  exclude-dirs:
    - build

Go environment

$ go version && go env
go version && go env
go version go1.23.6 linux/amd64
GO111MODULE=''
GOARCH='amd64'
GOBIN=''
GOCACHE='/home/user/.cache/go-build'
GOENV='/home/user/.config/go/env'
GOEXE=''
GOEXPERIMENT=''
GOFLAGS=''
GOHOSTARCH='amd64'
GOHOSTOS='linux'
GOINSECURE=''
GOMODCACHE='/home/user/golang/pkg/mod'
GONOPROXY='comp.com/*'
GONOSUMDB='comp.com/*'
GOOS='linux'
GOPATH='/home/user/golang'
GOPRIVATE='comp.com/*'
GOPROXY='https://proxy.golang.org,direct'
GOROOT='/home/user/golang/pkg/mod/golang.org/[email protected]'
GOSUMDB='sum.golang.org'
GOTMPDIR=''
GOTOOLCHAIN='auto'
GOTOOLDIR='/home/user/golang/pkg/mod/golang.org/[email protected]/pkg/tool/linux_amd64'
GOVCS=''
GOVERSION='go1.23.6'
GODEBUG=''
GOTELEMETRY='local'
GOTELEMETRYDIR='/home/user/.config/go/telemetry'
GCCGO='gccgo'
GOAMD64='v1'
AR='ar'
CC='gcc'
CXX='g++'
CGO_ENABLED='1'
GOMOD='/home/user/git/org/bridge/go.mod'
GOWORK=''
CGO_CFLAGS='-O2 -g'
CGO_CPPFLAGS=''
CGO_CXXFLAGS='-O2 -g'
CGO_FFLAGS='-O2 -g'
CGO_LDFLAGS='-O2 -g'
PKG_CONFIG='pkg-config'
GOGCCFLAGS='-fPIC -m64 -pthread -Wl,--no-gc-sections -fmessage-length=0 -ffile-prefix-map=/tmp/go-build3213195946=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches

Verbose output of running

$ golangci-lint cache clean
$ golangci-lint run -v
N/A

A minimal reproducible example or link to a public repository

N/A - see issue description

Validation

• Yes, I've included all information above (version, config, etc.).

Supporter

• I am a sponsor/backer through GitHub or OpenCollective

[boring-cyborg]

Hey, thank you for opening your first Issue ! 🙂 If you would like to contribute we have a guide for contributors.

[bombsimon]

You've checked the "Yes, I've read the typecheck section of the FAQ" box but did you really do that? If so it seems like you didn't understand the documentation. (Feel free to suggest improvements if we can clarify anything!)

The key point is that typecheck is not a real linter. You will never be able to disable it or exclude it since it's not a linter.

... in build/CI/CD related directories not intended to be linted

Are these directories also not supposed to be able to compile with Go? If not, you will have to invoke golangci-lint and target specific packages, e.g. golangci-lint run ./pkg1 ./pkg2. Default is, as you mention yourself, ./... which will include all packages, including ones that doesn't build successfully. So even if it's tedious you'll have to do that just as with go build.

If the code is supposed to be valid and compile successfully, can you confirm that go build ./... works and that you've followed the checklist in the FAQ on how to troubleshoot typecheck errors?

[gakesson]

Hello @bombsimon ,

Thanks for reverting back!
Yes I did read the FAQ and with that (along with digging into the code) it is clear why/what is happening but what I would consider a bit unintuitive is that if I specify "exclude-dir" then this is not honoured, from a usability point of view. As far as I've understood the docs there is nothing indicating that "exclude-dir" only applies to linting rather than entire analysis scope.

For us we typically have directories cmd, internal, pkg and possibly others and when building we specify go build towards the cmd/ where the main is (nothing else), but for golangci-lint we would then need to specify each directory eligible for linting for the repository and that I guess is the difference and makes it a bit more cumbersome compared to go build.

The code under build/ is not necessarily meant to compile since it is used by various parallel analysis CI/CD jobs (license compliance etc.)

Best Regards,
Gustav Åkesson

[bombsimon]

Gotcha!

To clarify the reason why this is happening is that the exclude-dir setting is referring to excluding issues from these directories, not the actual analysis, note that it's under the issues section.

Running golangci-lint (or golangci-lint ./...) would result in a similar behavior as go build ./.... To avoid golangci-lint to analyze specific packages you would simply have to use a different pattern than ./... just like when you target ./cmd to build.

Best I can think of from the top of my head would be something like

golangci-lint run $(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name "*some-exclude-pattern*" ! -name '.*' -exec echo "{}/..." \;)

Or maybe easier to write include patterns?

golangci-lint run $(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "*some-include-pattern*" -exec echo "{}/..." \;)

PS. This is a very common question and I mentioned it just last month in #5297 (comment) around exclusions for the upcoming v2. However we didn't really end up with any changes on the topic.

[ldez]

You can also use build tags to skip the "non-compilable" files.