Why should I put files inside .idea folder under version control?

Question

Official documentation of PhpStorm states that:

All the settings files in the .idea directory should be put under version control except the workspace.xml, which stores your local preferences. The workspace.xml file should be marked as ignored by VCS.

Can you please tell me what is the reason for this?

Answer 1

This is more of an opinion rather than answer, but you shouldn't put any of your workspace-related files into the repository. Every developer has his own configurations, application and server stack and I don't need to know that you're using NetBeans (.nbproject directory) and you don't need to know that I'm using PHPStorm (.idea). Repository should contain only project-related files, eg.:

• source code,
• default configurations,
• templates,
• libraries,
• documentation,
• 3rd party configurations (Travis, Composer),

and so on.