Sharing IntelliJ IDEA Project Files (directory based format) in Version Control

Even if your project uses a build system like Maven that IDEA can leverage to automatically synchronize its library settings, there are still more project settings worth sharing with your project's version control system:

• Run configurations
• Code style settings
• Inspection profiles
• Version control settings
• File encoding settings
• Ant build configuration (if your project uses Ant)

First of all, the project module configuration files (.iml files) should be put under version control. With the new directory based project file format, the file modules.xml in the subdirectory .idea in your project's root directory should also be added to the VCS. Since module configuration files reference Java SDKs configured in IDEA your team should agree on a common naming of  them in IDEA or use the solution described in Hamlet D'Arcy article Sharing IntelliJ IDEA Project Files in Version Control on DZone. If your project doesn't depend on a specific update version of a JDK, naming SDKs in IDEA according to their major version ("1.6" for Java 6 SDK, e.g.) should do a good job and relieves your team members from installing JDKs and adjusting IDEA's SDKs concertedly.

Did you ever had to support a team member, because the application showed strange behaviour when run in his IDE and it turned out that he forgot to set one of the undocumented runtime parameters needed in the IDE runtime? Create a Shared Runtime configuration (Checkbox "Share configuration" in the Run/Debug Configurations dialog) and put it under version control. IDEA creates a file for each Shared Runtime configuration in the directory .idea/runConfigurations/.

If code quality is taken seriously in your project, configure the Code Style and the Inspection Profile and put the corresponding files .idea/projectCodeStyle.xml and the ones in .idea/inspectionProfiles/ under version control.

If your project uses Ant as build system and build scripts has been added to IDEA's Ant Build Tool, add the corresponding configuratin file ./idea/ant.xml to the VCS.

To share file encodings, VCS and IDEA compiler settings, add the files encodings.xml, vcs.xml and compiler.xml in .idea to the VCS. Finally, the file .idea/misc.xml should be added to the VCS.

Workspace-specific settings are kept in .idea/workspace.xml. Thus, this file should be ignored. As well as uiDesigner.xml if don't use IDEA's UI designer. IDEA creates these files after the project is opened the first time after checkout.

Things you can't share with version control:

Unfortunately, file templates available in the context menu New can't be shared, because they are saved in IDEA's configuration directory.