@Markus I'm very keen to support the directory structure. I did not manage to have a look at this for 0.9. But I will check your patch soon. Many thx.

+1 I cannot think of a "need" for it, but I definitely find the directory-based setup much cleaner.

The .idea project structure is very beneficial for projects that involve multiple users. The .ipr file stores too much user-specific information. With the .idea approach, the .ipr is basically split up into multiple files and only those that are applicable to all users are commited to the repository.

The .idea project structure has been the default for a long time now.
For a 'new' build system to generate .ipr files seems weird.

I totally agree. I find this should really make it into 1.0.

Almost two years have passed and Gradle still uses .ipr. Any news on this? All our projects use .idea approach...

We'd like to add support for this however other things turned out more important. Thanks a lot for the reminder!

The native Gradle integration in IDEA uses the .idea directory format, so you might potentially use that as a 'workaround', rather than using the `gradle idea` task. They are both driven from the same model, so you should end up with the same results.

As far as I know with the native Gradle integration in IDEA you still need to reimport the project every time you add or remove a dependency. That's the reason why some people use the idea plugin: to keep the idea configuration in sync with the gradle build files. But it would be better if the plugin worked with .idea files.

There's no question that the plugin should work with .idea files.

The native Gradle integration is improving all the time. For example, in IDEA 11.1 you can resynchronise the dependencies without reimporting the project. And we're working with the jetbrains folks to make this better.

Adam, but it still cannot read projects like Hibernate. And even with 11.1, I have still had trouble getting it to load simpler projects I work on.

IDEA native Gradle integration is still painful - it seems to spend inordinate amounts of time frequently refreshing the gradle dependencies even on the simplest project and does not handle version changes to the dependencies without tedious manual intervention. It also gets in a real mess if the project files are shared via SCM and the artefacts are in different places in the Gradle cache.

Would love to see .idea project support so I can turn off JetGradle in IDEA.

Guys, any news on this?

@Andrew, not yet. We'd welcome a contribution for this, if you (or anyone else) is interested in helping out.

It is actually very easy to workaround. The .idea directory structure requires only modules.xml file that is identical to the *.ipr file that idea plugin generates. So I could just use this simple task to create directory based structure:

  task setup {
     dependsOn ideaModule, ideaProject
     doLast {
       copy {
          from '.'
          into '.idea/'
          include '*.ipr'
          rename { "modules.xml" }
       }
       project.delete "${project.name}.ipr"
     }
  }

The task could be improved to better support the cleanup of the outputs however.

Another option is just use the idea plugin tasks the first time and once project is opened in the IDE, do "File -> Save as directory based project"

However, the plugin could just generate .idea instead of *.ipr by default and just drop *ipr support for good.

Just wanted to poke this since it's been a while since the last update and has been open for almost four years now (understandably so).

Any progress on this one?

@https://gist.github.com/childnode/12757be70b2895a1eed0 to also catch up the .iws file, but this solution doesn't work. The language level is still not set correctly in IDEa 15. Any ideas?

As announced on the Gradle blog we are planning to completely migrate issues from JIRA to GitHub.

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Please confirm that you still advocate for your JIRA issue before December 10th, 2016 by:

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We look forward to collaborating with you more closely on GitHub. Thank you for your contribution to Gradle!

The issue is now tracked here: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/1366