Gitlab enable merge driver and configure .gitattributes exclude file (folders) on merge request

Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Native
1

I’ve put up GitLab CE vers. 1.9.1 and a i have 2 branches (dev,stage). I need to merge branch dev with stage and I read I have to enable a certain merge driver and configure .gitattributes to exclude file/folders on merge request.

I have tested this answer:

and

, but none of these seem to work.
I’ve inserted the lines in the ${GitDir}/.config and i declared my file names in a .gitattribute committed in branch dev but it doesn’t ignore any file/folder specified from being updated to branch stage.

  My questions are:
How to enable merge driver in GitLab CE?
How to exclude files/folders from merge using .gitattributes or other solutions you may suggest to achieve this ?
2

Did you ever find a solution to this problem? Also wanted to do the same thing for one of my projects and the .gitattributes solution doesn’t work because in this case, there are no conflicts to resolve and thus the merge driver specified in .gitattributes gets ignored as per the answer in