Control Freak plugin offfers to block specific file types to commit. But How to utilize it.

[Former user]

I can see that, there is an option to block specific file types in the configuration of the control freak plugin. but how to utilize it? I tried with different kinds of expressions like ( *.pdf and pdf and .pdf ) ...and nothing worked to block-pushing pdf files to the repository.

Please find the attached screenshot.

My question is, how to block specific files to be pushed to bitbucket central repository.

Thanks Mahesh

[Julius Davies [bit-booster.com]]

(copy/pasting my reply on community.atlassian.com):

Are you sure?  This is working for me (I'm the primary maintainer of this plugin):

remote: Control Freak: Push rejected.
remote: 
remote: Control Freak
remote: -----
remote: Push rejected.
remote: All files larger than 500 bytes are not permitted.
remote: Specific files [*.exe, *.pdf, *.zip] larger than 200 bytes are also not permitted.
remote: The following file is too large:
remote: 
remote: test.pdf (1723760 bytes)
remote: 
remote: You can push large files to this repository using 'git lfs':
remote: git lfs track <path>
remote: 

There is one important loophole to know about with this control:  any file that already exists in the repo (on any branch or tag, including unreachable tags or branches, and including files deleted many commits ago - they are still present in the repo) cannot be blocked (based on contents, not based on filename).  The control only gets triggered during the phase where git-receive is calculating missing files to accept during the push, and since git-receive skips files that already exist on the server, regardless of their name, there is no way to block those.

This means developers can also easily get around the control:  "git push random-file.allowed" and then rename to "random-file.pdf" in a later push.

Is there any chance you guys are hitting against this loophole, where byte-for-byte identical files (regardless of name) cannot be blocked if they are already present in bitbucket?

p.s.  the control happily accepts all of these:  pdf, .pdf, *.pdf

(they all evaluate to the same file type)

[Julius Davies [bit-booster.com]]

They way you’ve configured things all NEW files than end in *.md should be blocked if they are 77 bytes or larger.

[Julius Davies [bit-booster.com]]

Closing since we cannot replicate this.

Note: starting with Control Freak v2020.11.03 we always allow ALL files through that are between 50 - 300 bytes, since otherwise the Git-LFS pointer files get rejected!