Ability to filter out shared yaml anchors from changes output?

[machty]

YAML anchors are great for shared config, but if you're trying to use the changes output to drive the matrix of another job, then any anchors you use (which are required by YAML to be attached to a YAML object declaration) are themselves going to appear in the list of changes, e.g.

          shared: &shared
            - common/**
            - config/**
          src:
            - *shared
            - src/**
          lib:
            - *shared
            - lib/**

Assuming I only want matrix jobs for src and lib, this will produced the undesired result of also adding shared to the changes array, which will generate a job for shared even though shared is only meant to be used as a yaml mixin. Is there any way to filter this out?

[lucasyarid]

Do you happen to have any updates/workaround on this?
The only thing I could think of is conditionally not running steps for shared, which makes it worse, so I'm just going with not using &shared.

[machty]

@lucasyarid I ended up passing the output to a JS script to filter out undesired output.

[JavierMonton]

Having the same issue here. This is a workaround using bash and jq.

  changes:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      services: ${{ steps.filter_shared.outputs.without-shared }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: dorny/paths-filter@v3
        id: filter
        with:
          filters: |
            shared: &shared
              - 'something/**'
              - 'foo/bar/baz/**'
            service1:
              - *shared
              - 'foo/bar/**'
            service2:
              - *shared
              - 'baz/**'
      # filter out "shared" from services
      - name: Filter shared
        id: filter_shared
        run: |
          echo "without-shared=$(echo '${{ steps.filter.outputs.changes }}' | jq -c 'map(select(. != "shared"))')" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

[lucasyarid]

Finally found some time to open a PR to fix the issue.
Waiting on directions/approval.