In a new post to his site Nikola Posa shows the PHPStorm users out there how to keep metadata about your projects away from the source (the content in the ./idea directory it creates by default).

I fell in love with PhpStorm only few months ago ago when I switched from NetBeans, my favorite IDE by then. One thing that I was missing from the very start is the ability to separate project metadata (.idea/ directory) from sources, because I like to keep away everything that is unnecessary from my project directory, as well as from the .gitignore file. It turned out that something like that is possible, but in contrast to NetBeans it's not so evident and requires a little more effort

It's a pretty simple four step process and he shows what settings to change:

• Create new project in a directory where you would usually keep metadata
• Open Settings / Preferences dialog and click on Directories node
• Click Add Content Root button and select project sources directory
• Remove content root that keeps project metadata

Screenshots are also included for each step to help make sure you're in the right place at all times.