Organizing MQL5 Trading Projects with Version Control and Safer Debugging
Summary
This article offers a workflow for maintaining MQL5 projects across development and trading terminals. It recommends keeping each project's experts, scripts, libraries, and data in separate directories, and using a shared project location to avoid maintaining duplicate source files. Git provides change history and branching; the article also gives an example of excluding generated files and unrelated terminal content from version control.
For release management, the author suggests debugging on a separate terminal with a demo account, then copying compiled files to the real-account terminal. Batch scripts can compile multiple source files together, helping catch inconsistencies across programs that use shared functions. The remaining guidance covers task boards, filtering terminal logs by symbol, highlighting log output, and searching only project files. These are practical software maintenance recommendations rather than trading or testing results. The specific paths, tools, and scripts reflect the author's setup and may need adaptation to another MQL5 environment.
Key ideas
- Keeping project files in dedicated directories makes code easier to search, version, and move between terminals.
- Git can track source changes while ignoring generated binaries, logs, and unrelated terminal files.
- Debugging on a demo terminal separates development from the compiled release used on a real account.
- Compiling related source files together can expose compatibility issues caused by changes to shared functions.
- Filtered and highlighted logs, along with a task board, can help organize debugging and development work.
Tags
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.