Projects

One of the main goals of Projectile is to operate on a wide range of project types without the need for any configuration. To achieve this it contains a lot of project detection logic and project type specific logic.

If a project you are working on is recognized incorrectly or you want to add your own type of projects you can add following to your Emacs initialization code

What this does is:

The available options are:

You can also pass a symbolic reference to a function into your project type definition if you wish to define the compile command dynamically:

If you would now navigate to a file that has the *.java extension under the ./tests/ directory and hit C-c c p you will see ./gradlew build as the suggestion. If you were to navigate to a HTML file the compile command will have switched to ./gradlew compile-templates.

This works for:

Note that your function has to return a string to work properly.

You can set the values of projectile-project-root-files, projectile-project-root-files-top-down-recurring, projectile-project-root-files-bottom-up and projectile-project-root-files-functions to customize how project roots are identified.

To customize project root files settings:

If you’d like to instruct Projectile to ignore certain files in a project, when indexing it you can do so in the .projectile file by adding each path to ignore, where the paths all are relative to the root directory and start with a slash. Everything ignored should be preceded with a - sign. Alternatively, not having any prefix at all also means to ignore the directory or file pattern that follows. Here’s an example for a typical Rails application:

This would ignore the folders only at the root of the project. Projectile also supports relative pathname ignores:

You can also ignore everything except certain subdirectories. This is useful when selecting the directories to keep is easier than selecting the directories to ignore, although you can do both. To select directories to keep, that means everything else will be ignored.

Example:

Keep in mind that you can only include subdirectories, not file patterns.

If both directories to keep and ignore are specified, the directories to keep first apply, restricting what files are considered. The paths and patterns to ignore are then applied to that set.

Finally, you can override ignored files. This is especially useful when some files ignored by your VCS should be considered as part of your project by projectile:

When a path is overridden, its contents are still subject to ignore patterns. To override those files as well, specify their full path with a bang prefix.

If you would like to include comment lines in your .projectile file, you can customize the variable projectile-dirconfig-comment-prefix. Assigning it a non-nil character value, e.g. #, will cause lines in the .projectile file starting with that character to be treated as comments instead of patterns.

From project to project, some things may differ even in the same language - coding styles, auto-completion sources, etc. If you need to set some variables according to the selected project, you can use a standard Emacs feature called Per-directory Local Variables. To use it you must create a file named .dir-locals.el (as specified by the constant dir-locals-file) inside the project directory. This file should contain something like this:

The top-level alist member referenced with the key nil applies to the entire project. A key with the name eval will evaluate its corresponding value. In the example above, this is used to create a function. It could also be used to e.g. add such a function to a key map.

You can also quickly visit or create the dir-locals-file with s-p E (M-x projectile-edit-dir-locals RET).

Here are a few examples of how to use this feature with Projectile.

Projectile exposes many variables (via defcustom) which allow users to customize its behavior. Directory variables can be used to set these customizations on a per-project basis.

You could enable caching for a project in this way:

If one of your projects had a file that you wanted Projectile to ignore, you would customize Projectile by:

If you wanted to wrap the git command that Projectile uses to list the files in you repository, you could do:

If you want to use a different project name than how Projectile named your project, you could customize it with the following:

There are a few variables that are intended to be customized via .dir-locals.el.

When these variables have their default value of nil, Projectile runs the default command for the current project type. You can override this behavior by setting them to either a string to run an external command or an Emacs Lisp function: