Exclude directories while analysing codebase

[Beeram12]

1. I am trying to analyse a codebase with C, C++ using the MISRA/CERT query package during analysis.

2. I found there are many false positives which are not required to solve this I need to exclude some directories which are not required.

3. To solve this issue, I think in the official documentation, they gave methods using github workflow technique

4. But isn't there any other way while analysing the database to exclude directories? By writing a YAML file or including the directories you want to exclude in the .qls file, as we do for excluding queries.

If there are any other methods to exclude dir please let me know

[devhorizon999]

For this case I would separate two things:

1. Choosing which queries run
2. Choosing which source files are extracted/analyzed

A .qls file is mainly for the first one. It can include or exclude queries, but it is not the right place to exclude source directories from the CodeQL database.

To exclude directories, you usually need to do it at database creation / extraction time.

If you are using a CodeQL configuration file, you can use paths / paths-ignore, for example:

# codeql-config.yml
name: "CodeQL config"

paths-ignore:
  - third_party/**
  - vendor/**
  - generated/**
  - tests/**