How does this work?

[ariselseng]

Can anyone please explain how I use this? I have a sub directory with tens of thousands of files I want to ignore.

[ComputerCarl]

I extracted to folder to /var/www/nextcloud/apps, changed permissions, and ran the following command, but how do I tell if this app is enabled and working?
sudo -u www-data php occ config:app:set --value '[".snapshot",".git". "Thumbs.db", "node_modules"]' files_excludedirs exclude
resulted in confirmation;
Config value exclude for app files_excludedirs set to [".snapshot",".git". "Thumbs.db", "node_modules"]

[GuyPaddock]

Answer: It only appears to affect new files, but it doesn't remove matching files from the file cache (it will block access to them, though). If you have existing files that the plugin matches that should not appear in search results, you will need to remove them from the NC database manually.

I've provided updated docs in my fork of the Readme (specifically, how it works with existing vs. newly-added files):
https://github.com/Inveniem/nextcloud-files-excludedirs/blob/master/README.md