can you use wildcards in the middle of directories in gitlab-ci.yml

Question

According to: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#onlychanges--exceptchanges, you can list wildcards for all subdirectories:

docker build:
  script: docker build -t my-image:$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG .
  only:
    refs:
      - branches
    changes:
      - Dockerfile
      - docker/scripts/*
      - dockerfiles/**/*
      - more_scripts/*.{rb,py,sh}
      - "**/*.json"

but what about if you want to include multiple directories? say I have a folder stucture like this:

server-a-files/**/*
server-b-files/**/*
server-c-files/**/*

etc. would something like this work?

docker build:
  script: docker build -t my-image:$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG .
  only:
    refs:
      - branches
    changes:
      - server-*-files/**/*

or would I need to do something like this:

docker build:
  script: docker build -t my-image:$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG .
  only:
    refs:
      - branches
    changes:
      - server-{a,b,c}-files/**/*

thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, you can use a wildcard in the middle of a path segment. GitLab uses Ruby's fnmatch for testing glob patterns for changes:.

irb(main):002:0> File.fnmatch('server-*-files/**/*', 'server-a-files/foo/bar')
=> true