For PHP projects, Netbeans 8.1 seems to always ignore the vendor directory in Git repositories, regardless of the content of any .gitignore file or the project ignore folders settings.
Is it possible to stop Netbeans 8.1 from always ignoring the vendor directory?
For instance for projects which have a vendor directory that has nothing to do with Composer or for projects where all files required to run the code should be included in the repository?
Maybe vendor is consider as a non-shareable folder, as build and dist would be in a J2SE project.
Try, as in issue 194650:
Tools > Misc > Versioning > Git. Unselect 'Permanently ignore not-sharable files'
Also, check you <yourRepo>/.git/info/exclude file: it it exists, it might include vendor/
As commented by the OP Martijn:
Turns out this is a new feature in NB 8.1.
I filed a bug report which was accepted and the next update should have options for disabling this feature for composer, bower and npm folders.
That was implemented a few day later in March 2016: "Ignore vendor directory from versioning" (changeset 681ac116d63b)
Please, uncheck it (available for Bower, npm and Composer) and ideally restart the IDE.