As a general best practice, should the .meltano directory be committed to Git?

Hi, @francis_potter. The .meltano folder should be excluded from git commits as a general rule. New projects created via

meltano init

should include this directory within .gitignore by default. Among other interim, local, and temporary artifacts, the .meltano directory is also the default location for a SQLite system DB, which may hold credentials and other secrets set via

meltano config

. Lastly, this directory can often hold log files, which should be checked for secrets as a general rule before sharing externally. Does this help?

OK thanks, that’s what I thought. I might have overwritten the default .gitignore with my usual Python project settings. Oops. It seems like, without .meltano, someone who clones the whole project needs to run a simple “meltano install” to get all the plugins installed.

Yes, that's correct. In a new workstation or a new container, the first step is indeed to run

meltano install

. One of the reasons for this is that the virtual environments are specifically compatible with the host machine's OS architecture, as well as being defined specific to the host machine's installed python version.

That’s OK. I’m good with the install step. Thanks!