Should i delete dist folder of my project made in netbeans?

Question

I am creating a project and day by day its size is increasing in GBs. It is normal DB Project consisting of cool GUI and some jar files. You will wonder to know that its size is now 1.34Gbs.

I found a folder named dist , which is occupying 1.23GBs.

My question is that, should i delete this dist folder, or is it has any major role in my project.

The dist folder is containing these files,

Is there any way to decrease my project's space??

Answer 1

These are the files which are created by "build" option in NetBeans. That means these are cross platform executable versions of your project. Deleting them won't do any harm to your source files.

Answer 2

The dist folder will be created once you click the build function in the Netbeans IDE. The dist folder is the executable project folder, it will not affect your project if you want to delete it.

Remember, even you delete you dist folder, it IDE will create a new one whenever you click build the project again.

TIPs: try to use clean build to build the project since it will automatically remove the older builds and only saves the newest build version.

Answer 3

Your project should contains just your source code and resources that affect the behavior of your app. Those files that are created by your IDE must not affect this configuration.

If you are currently working with this project I don't recommend you to delete them, but if you configured correctly your project through build automation tools (like maven, gradle, etc) it has no importance, because the IDE must be intelligent enough to read these configurations and set your entire project automatically.