Use rsync to mirror source for website deployment, but not delete selected files in destination

Question

I have been working on this for several days and no matter what I do I can't get it to work. I've read practically every Q&A on StackExchange network about rsync but still not found the answer.

Basically I am writing a website deploy tool and it uses rsync to move files from a source Git repo to deploy Git repo; the destination. Committing to the deploy repo actually deploys the code to the web server so I am delaying with rsync between two different directories.

It is very important that any files that the developer deleted in the source repo also get deleted in the deploy repo. However, there are selected files that are in the deploy repo that need to not be deleted Specifically this are files that the hosting provider provides and are needed in production but that are problematic to maintain in the source repo.

I understand from what I have read in man, here, and elsewhere that if I add the names of the files that are in the deploy/destination repo that I want to keep to an --exclude-from file

Here is what I am doing, basically:

rsync --archive --verbose \
      --exclude ".git" --exclude ".git*" \
      --exclude-from="/tmp/excludes.txt" --delete-after \
      /dir/to/source/repo/ \
      /dir/to/deploy/repo

And for example purposes let's say this is the contents of /tmp/excludes.txt:

/foo/bar/baz.php

Now when I have tried this using a trivial example locally it always seems to work as expected. But when I use it with CircleCI in a real-world deploy scenario, rsync always deletes /foo/bar/baz.php after running the above command.

Can you see what I am doing wrong? Thanks in advance.

UPDATE - THE ABOVE DOES WORK

Turns out the logic in my script running in CircleCI was at fault, and I just could not see it. I was running multiple rsync commands with different roots (essentially subdirectories of my main root) because of different rules needed, and one list of exclude files with filepaths that were all based on the main root. Ugh.

Anyway dear reader, the upshot is that the above example indeed works as I describing how I wanted it to work.

Answer 1

Just to close the loop, if anyone reading this wants to know how to use rsync to mirror the destination directory with the source directory except for specific named files this is how you would do it:

rsync --archive --verbose \
      --exclude-from="/tmp/excludes.txt" --delete-after \
      /dir/to/source/repo/ \
      /dir/to/deploy/repo

This is the contents of /tmp/excludes.txt where the named file within has a full filepath of /dir/to/deploy/repo/foo/bar/baz.php:

/foo/bar/baz.php