I want to know what files in a Maven project should be committed to git.
Am I suppose to perform a mvn clean
before committing, or do I add certain files to the .gitignore
file?
I want to know what files in a Maven project should be committed to git.
Am I suppose to perform a mvn clean
before committing, or do I add certain files to the .gitignore
file?
4
Answers
Check this:
https://www.gitignore.io/api/maven
In general you should ignore all targets and metadata. If you ignore targets,
mvn clean
is not required before pushing.Personally I use Maven gitignore and Java gitignore for a Maven project. You might need to adjust it with the languages used in your Maven project.
https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Maven.gitignore
https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Java.gitignore
Add rules to your
.gitignore
file first, which makes Git ignores the undesired files correctly. Understanding Maven standard directory layout will also help you better determine which are the undesired directories.Executing
mvn clean
before committing is not practical at all. Developers can forget that and besides they should rebuild their projects at each commit.The correct way is using
.gitignore
to specify files to ignored in the tracking. Just commit it and push into the remote branch and all developers could work with the same rules.You want to commit/push files that you want to version/track.
But it is very broad. You cannot have rules just for Maven. Maven have some specificities (
target
folder for example that you want to ignore) but you would have probably more things to ignore.You want to generally commit/push the source code and application configuration files such as
pom.xml
or any configuration files used in your build but you can also add any other kind of files. For example committing a changelog or even a word document (more rare but possible) may also be valid.Generally what you don’t want to commit are files that :
target
folder in Maven but you could also have other folders according to your pom configuration)I had a Maven project in VSCodium and had to decide whether to commit the .project file or not. That should be linked to in this Q/A since it happens with other IDE:s as well that have Maven extensions.
This is 2010, only for Eclipse:
.classpath and .project – check into version control or not?
which says overall that it should be committed. I guess the discussion is timeless. It is a Maven generated file, but it should still be in the repository, and even more, if the repository is at work with the same setup and tools by the team.
Other questions:
The same for the .classpath. Even if it is made by Maven, it should be in the repo.
I am a beginner at Maven and only guess this. I cannot understand why this was not in this Q/A up to now. The accepted answer lists the ignored files, but from reading that, I was not fully sure what to do with these meta files from Maven. And there is even one answer that lists the two files as files that are to be ignored in this Q/A here. Which, as far as I can see from a repository I took over, and guessing from the accepted answer, is wrong: the two files belong to the version control.