With the latest improvements we made at troii to our development workflow, we discussed what should be committed to a source code repository and what files should be ignored. We already had the rule in place, that nothing should be put into the repository, that is generated from other sources (typically .class files, .war, .jar, …) – this rule is very common and agreed by almost every developer.

How to handle another set of files usually leads to a lot of discussion: IDE settings, e.g. Eclipse .settings, .project, .classpath or IDEA IntelliJ .iml and .idea directory). Up until a year ago we mainly used Eclipse and I used to store the IDE configuration files in the repository. With switching to IntelliJ and working more with git branches, I startet to think about this again, because I had the feeling that those settings files changed more frequently.