Sharing a single .editorconfig file across multiple projects

Question

My team maintains several Java repositories in GitHub. Each of them has an .editorconfig file in the root folder and they're all exactly the same. This makes maintaining them a bit of a pain because they all have to be updated individually.

All of us use IntelliJ, which has a feature that will download checkstyle rules from a URL, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that with the .editorconfig rules.

All of our projects use Maven. Is there any way to make the .editorconfig file accessible through an API and have the projects configured to automatically download it and put it in the root folder?

For anyone not familiar with EditorConfig, more info is here.

Answer 1

I made a tool to solve this kind of problem. It is developed as an NPM package but it is basically just a command line tool so it should work for this case. If you execute something like npx your-dictator-name@version with Exec Maven Plugin.

The tool is called Dictator Builder and helps create "dictators". A dictator is the command line tool that contains "dictatables", your .editorconfig can be part of a "dictatable".

In your case you could have a .dictatable-config.json with something like:

{
  "message": "Copy editorconfig",
  "actions": [
    {
      "copyFrom": ".editorconfig",
      "target": "."
    }
  ]
}