A project is a collection of files used for producing one or more programs. Files that belong to a project are typically stored in a hierarchy of directories; the top-level directory of the hierarchy is known as the project root.
Whether a given directory is a root of some project is determined by the project-specific infrastructure, known as project back-end. Emacs currently supports two such back-ends: VC-aware (see Version Control), whereby a VCS repository is considered a project; and EDE (see Emacs Development Environment). This is expected to be extended in the future to support additional types of projects.
Which files do or don’t belong to a project is also determined by
the project back-end. For example, the VC-aware back-end doesn’t
consider “ignored” files (see Ignore Version Control Files) to be part of the
project. Also, the VC-aware Project back-end considers “untracked”
files by default. That behavior is controllable with the variable
project-vc-include-untracked.