Grails 2.X .gitignore file

November 17, 2013 Grails, Groovy, Java, SourceControl - GIT

With a new Grails 2.X project you run into challenges on which folders to check-in into a GIT repository. You want to remove any non-essential files that Grails can rebuild at run-time. And if you are using either GITHub or BitBucket for your GIT repo’s the default .gitignore file created or provided by GITHub is setup for configured for a Grails 1.X project and not a Grails 2.X project.

So here are a few simple steps to help you create the correct .gitignore file for a Grails 2.X project:

Step-1: Create the following .gitignore file under the root Grails project folder:


*.iws
*Db.properties
*Db.script
.settings
.classpath
.project
.idea
eclipse
stacktrace.log
target
target-eclipse
/plugins
/web-app/plugins
/web-app/WEB-INF/classes
web-app/WEB-INF/tld/c.tld
web-app/WEB-INF/tld/fmt.tld

Step-2: Git does not allow you to check in empty (but essential folders). To avoid this you can run the following command:


find . -type d -empty -exec touch {}/.gitignore \;

The above command creates a empty “.gitignore” file below all folders. And since you now have non-empty folders, you can now check them in into Git so that if you check-out/clone the project in the future, you will have those essential but empty folders.

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Cheers