This repository contains best practices for managing the .idea directory within IntelliJ IDEA projects. By following these guidelines, teams can maintain consistency in their development environment settings, version control configurations, and project-specific preferences, reducing potential issues caused by conflicting or missing configurations.
The .idea directory in an IntelliJ IDEA project stores various project-specific settings, including version control configurations, code style settings, and more. While some files in this directory are necessary for ensuring a consistent development environment across all team members, others are machine-specific or generated by the IDE, and therefore should not be tracked in version control.
This project provides a .gitignore file that follows a whitelist approach, ignoring all files in the .idea directory by default and explicitly including only those files that are essential for consistent team collaboration.
The .gitignore file in this repository ignores all files in the .idea directory by default, but whitelists specific files that should be tracked in version control:
vcs.xml: Ensures consistent version control configuration across all team members.encodings.xml: Guarantees that all text files in the project use the same character encoding.codeStyleSettings.xml: Enforces consistent code style and formatting rules across the team.dictionaries/: Includes project-specific custom dictionaries, ensuring uniform spelling and terminology.copyrights: Maintains consistent application of copyright notices across the project.misc.xml: Stores various essential project-specific settings that should be shared among team members.sqldialects.xml: Ensures that all team members are using the correct SQL dialect settings for the project.
- Do not specify any rule in your
.gitignorefile itself, all the stuff related to JetBrains IDEA will be handled in.idea/.gitignore - Copy the content of
.gitignoreinto your.idea/.gitignorefile - Track, commit and push those changes (e.g:
git add . & git commit -m "Track recommended .idea files" & git push)
TIP: If you had already started tracking
.ideafiles, you can first remove them from version tracking (without deleting them) by runninggit rm -r --cached .idea. The files will be "untracked" in Git, but files on disk won't be modified/deleted.