Jetbrains has some official guidance on which files should not be checked in, and which files should probably not be checked in, depending on your usage. According to that page, you should check in all files in the .idea
directory except:
workspace.xml
tasks.xml
And probably also:
- the xml files in the
dictionary
subdirectory
While the particular answer may depend on your team’s particular practices, in my experience, following that guidance generally results in correct separation of user settings and shared project configuration.
Some examples of files that should be shared, according to this guidance:
ant.xml
, which, if you use Ant to build your project, points IDEA to your build files and configures properties that should be used to build.vcs.xml
, which specifies the Version Control configuration for your projectencodings.xml
, which specifies how IDEA should treat the text files in your projectmodules.xml
, which points IDEA to each of your project’s module configuration files, which should also be shared in your VCS.- all files under the
runConfigurations
subdirectory, which tells IDEA what it needs to do to run your application codeStyleSettings.xml
, which, as you have alluded to, puts your whole team on the same page in terms of automatic code formatting
Depending on your team’s usage, there may be more or less, but those are some of the biggest examples.