Deployment results in "No changes detected in base directory. Returning early from build."

[iechoi]

We have a frontend site published to scoutvet-demo.netlify.app, which deploys off the demo branch of our private repo. The last time we successfully published from this branch was in November 2021. We’ve added some new features in the past few months and merged 100+ commits to the demo branch, but the deployment ended early with “No changes detected in base directory. Returning early from build.”. Forced deployments end with the same result. How does the deployment system detect changes? I’m pretty sure there’ve been some changes in the base directory (build/frontend) in all those commits over the last few months.

[hrishikesh]

Hey @iechoi,

This might help:

Auto publish from Gitlab not working

you are seeing a different problem @I_Seth - in your logs you see the line Canceled build due to no content change which is the issue - we don’t see any changes within your base directory since the last commit, so our system tries to “save you” some probably unneeded build minutes (cf [Support Guide] How can I optimize my Netlify build time?). This of course is not helpful to you - you DO have changes you want to publish, I understand! To work around this “our build robots outsmarted themselve…