git - .gitignore for PhoneGap/Cordova 3.0 projects - what should I commit?

Question

I just tried to create a new phonegap 3.0 project... Note: I'm new to phonegap. Anyways, I see the project folder contains:

• .cordova
• merges
• platforms
• plugins
• www

And having tried phonegap local run android I see a lot of binary/generated files in platforms/android. This leaves me wondering, what parts of this folder structure should I add to my git repository. Normally, I would consider it extremely poor practice to commit binary files. Hence, I would normally add patterns like bin/, obj/, *.o, *.pyc etc. to .gitignore to avoid polluting my git repository with things that only serves to create merge conflicts.

Surely, www should be added to git, but what about the other parts of the project. To what extend are they products of the source code, and to what extend are they project configuration?

What do you do? Granted I'm new so I barely understand what makes sense here...

Answer 1

Expanding on @Jake Moshenko answer:

I like the idea of omitting the platforms directory. In fact, I am am able to exclude both the plugins and platforms directories. A good starting point for the .gitignore:

platforms/
plugins/

The problem with this is that clean copy of the repo must be initialized before you can actually work with it. It may make sense to create an init script such as:

#!/bin/bash
textReset=$(tput sgr0)
textGreen=$(tput setaf 2)
message_info () {
  echo "${textGreen}[my-app]${textReset} $1"
}

message_info "Creating necessary directories..."
mkdir plugins
mkdir platforms

message_info "Adding platforms..."
# If using cordova, change to: cordova platform add android
phonegap build android
phonegap build ios

message_info "Adding plugins..."
# If using cordova, change to: cordova plugin add
phonegap local plugin add https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/cordova-plugin-device.git

A caveat to this approach is that it makes it a little more challenging to customize the platform specific app code/config outside of what's supported by phonegap/cordova (i.e. screen orientation support).

Update: Bash Gist

This gist contains a more complete script for handling a project that does not commit the plugins and platforms directories. It provides a mechanism for copying the icons and splashscreen images from www to the platform directories (for iOS and Android), installing plugins, and handling platform specific files that should be added to version control.

Update: Grunt Gist

Here is another gist which is a Grunt port of the above mentioned bash script. (Thanks to @obie for suggesting grunt).