rsync exclude folder not working?

Question

I'm trying to copy the yaml files in my project to a dist folder, preserving the structure. However it is copying node_modules which I don't want. How do I exclude with rsync and why does my below command not work?

rsync -R --exclude=node_modules ./**/**.yaml dist

Note I've tried the variants, etc:

rsync -R --exclude= node_modules ./**/**.yaml dist
rsync -R --exclude 'node_modules' ./**/**.yaml dist

my folder structure:

projectroot
|--config/file.yaml
|
|--node_modules/somedir/somefile.yaml
|
|--src/somefolder/somefile.yaml

and I want the above to show up in my dist as:

dist
|--config/file.yaml
|  
|--src/somefolder/somefile.yaml

Answer 1

I have managed to get this working as follow:

$ rsync -r --exclude="node_modules" projectroot/* dist/

Answer 2

I ended up going with:

rsync -avrmR --exclude='node_modules/' --include='*/' --include='*.yaml' --exclude='*' ./ ./dist

How it works is it first excludes anything in the node_modules folder, then includes all directories and then includes only yaml files and then excludes everything else.