Resolving ‘Folder is Not Empty’ Warning in Aptana When Creating New Project

We use Aptana Studio 3 as our main coding IDE here in the office, and setting up new projects is a fairly regular occurrence. There was one issue however that I was constantly coming up against when setting up new projects that, whilst taking a short break, I set out to resolve.

The Problem

When setting up a new project in Aptana, one of the steps required is to select the location where the files reside. If creating a project in a folder that already contained files you’d get a ‘Folder is not empty‘ error like so:

You can see the error at the top, and the ‘Finish’ button disabled.

The Solution

Previously when faced with this problem, I would empty the folder in question by moving the files elsewhere, create the project, then move the files back. As you can imagine, this was annoying and time consuming, especially when trying to set up a large site.

Fortunately the solution turned out to be simple:

1. Select ‘File > Import…’

2. Expand the ‘General’ section and select ‘Existing Folder as New Project’. Click ‘Next’.

3. On the final step enter the name of your project and the location and a new project will be created in the folder selected.

And that’s it. No more emptying and moving around files simply to create a new project.