How to include files in .gcloudignore that are ignored in .gitignore

You can explicitly include a file if it has already been excluded by a pattern (such as inheriting your .gitignore settings, or an excluded directory) previously in the .gcloudignore file.

To include a file named foo, make sure the following comes after the rule that excluded it:

!foo

To include a folder named 'bar', make sure the following comes after the rule that excluded it:

!bar/

Source: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/topic/gcloudignore

The 2 files are mostly orthogonal, they serve different purposes and are used by different tools.

The only relationship between them (apart from .gcloudignore inheriting heavily from the .gitignore syntax and behaviour) is the ability to include the .gitignore file inside the .gcloudignore file, which is what you do with:

#!include:.gitignore

The side effect of that is, of course, that everything in .gitignore will also be ignored during GAE deployments, as you observed. From gcloud topic gcloudignore:

This will include the contents of a .gitignore-style file at that path at that point in the file. It does not recurse (that is, the included file cannot #!include another file) and cannot be anywhere but the top-level directory to be uploaded.

But you don't have to include .gitignore. All you need to do is drop that inclusion and specify exactly just the patterns from .gitignore that you want to ignore in deployments. If I understand correctly your goal description the .gcloudignore would look something like this:

.gcloudignore
.git
.gitignore

node_modules
module_data_import
module_calendar

If duplicating those patterns in both files bothers you a potential alternative (IMHO rather complex) might be to take advantage of git's ability to ignore files based on patterns collected from multiple sources (with different scopes, though, so pay attention to that). See https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore and Can I include other .gitignore file in a .gitignore file? (like #include in c-like languages).

If you can find a proper split fitting your application you could:

• keep in .gitignore just the patterns for files that you also want to ignore at deployments (keeping, of course, the .gitignore inclusion in .gcloudignore)
• place the other patterns in another file that git uses to determine ignore rules - thus they'd be ignored by git but since this file isn't included in .gcloudignore they would not be ignored at deployments.

UPDATE following comment:

In the initial answer I didn't consider the case in which the gcloud command itself executes operations that target directly or indirectly source code repository operations under the hood which, if using git as the version control system, will be, of course, impacted by the presence and content of the .gitignore file. In such case one could arguably consider that the gcloud command itself uses the .gitignore file (regardless of the .gcloudignore file).