Collaborating on Android Studio Project using git

Question

I am trying my hands on android development using android studio. I have created a project using android studio. Now, I want to track it using git. I have added it into git and everything works fine with my local machine.

But, when I clone it from another machine in different location, opening project in android studio displays very different project structure or prompts some error.

Generally,

Module has been removed from gradle structure. Do you want it to remove from project also?

After digging into bit, I realized that android studio (which is build on intelliJ) stores some hard-coded paths into some project configuration files. (Especially, .iml files). But, changing it to new path is also not working.

Can anybody suggest me proper way to include android studio project into git? Like, what configuration should I do? Which files should I ignore? After cloning it into other machine or path, what changes I should do? etc...

Answer 1

You would need to check if:

• you can configure Android Studio to use relative paths in the .iml (as shown in this old issue, using file://$PROJECT_DIR$/..., or this issue using content url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/...)

• or you would need to register a content filter driver (in a .gitattributes file) able to replace, on checkout, any absolute path by $MODULE_DIR$.

If that 'smudge' script doesn't detect any, your module.iml will be unchanged.
If it does detect absolute path, that script can introduce the proper modifications, and you will add and commit those, for others to reuse your project in a more portable way.