How to share Code Style settings between developers in IntelliJ

I would like all developers on my team to use the same default code style settings. We all use IntelliJ 11+ as our IDE and we use git as our source control system.

What is the easiest way to make sure they're all using the same settings? I thought there would be a way to check in the style settings into the project and have their editors discover them automatically, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

PS. I don't mind if developers consciously override some of the default settings with their own preferences, but I do want to make sure that we all at least start from a common set of default settings.

Code Style can be copied to project and saved in .idea/codeStyles to be shared via version control:

> Copy to Project Click this button to create a copy of the current global scheme to the project level. After creating the copy, IntelliJ > IDEA suggests to switch to this new scheme at the project level.

The Settings Repository feature was introduced at IntelliJ IDEA 2016.

This option helps us to share IDE settings between different computers, including sharing settings between developers.

The settings are stored at Git repository, for example on GitHub or Bitbucket.

To setup Git repository we should set URL via Settings Repository menu option.

The developer can load remote settings, overwrite remote settings or merge local settings with remote ones.

The structure of Git repository with settings:

I used personal access token for GitHub authentication.

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More information:

• Settings Repository
• Creating a personal access token for the command line

I came across this long after the fact, but thought I'd share if anyone ran into this. Add the following to your .gitignore

# IDE - IntelliJ
/.idea/*
# Keep the code styles.
!/.idea/codeStyles
/.idea/codeStyles/*
!/.idea/codeStyles/Project.xml
!/.idea/codeStyles/codeStyleConfig.xml
# Keep the inspection levels
!/.idea/inspectionProfiles
/.idea/inspectionProfiles/*
!/.idea/inspectionProfiles/Project_Default.xml

And of course, make sure your .gitignore also has a ! in front of it so these changes get picked up.

Basically, gitignore's recursive looking is a little wonky, so the below ignores a directory's contents, except for a subdirectory, then ignores that subdirectory's contents, except for the files we want.

codeStyleConfig lets you use per project settings, the project file itself is your actual code styles, and I included the Project_Default as it holds the warning levels, which you likely want if you're doing the code style work anyways.

You can create .editorconfig file in Your project (and it can be managed on directory level). More info on https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/configuring-code-style.html#editorconfig and https://editorconfig.org/

With this approach You can keep all Your code style settings in one file and it's not limited to IJ only.