Developing a Plugin

Gradle Plugin

The recommended solution for building IntelliJ Platform plugins is using Gradle with a dedicated Gradle plugin: IntelliJ Platform Gradle Plugin (2.x) or Gradle IntelliJ Plugin (1.x).

The IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and Community editions provide the necessary plugins to support Gradle-based plugin development: Gradle and Plugin DevKit. To verify these plugins are installed and enabled, see the help section about Managing Plugins.

Plugin DevKit plugin is bundled with IntelliJ IDEA until 2023.2.

The Gradle plugin manages the dependencies of a plugin project – both the base IDE and other plugin dependencies. It provides tasks to run the IDE with your plugin and to package and publish your plugin to the JetBrains Marketplace. To make sure that a plugin is not affected by API changes, which may happen between major releases of the platform, you can quickly verify your plugin against other IDEs and releases.

There are two main ways of creating a new Gradle-based IntelliJ Platform plugin project:

• dedicated generator available in the New Project Wizard – it creates a minimal plugin project with all the required files

• IntelliJ Platform Plugin Template available on GitHub – in addition to the required project files, it includes configuration of the GitHub Actions CI workflows

This documentation section describes the plugin structure generated with the New Project wizard, but the project generated with IntelliJ Platform Plugin Template covers all the described files and directories. See IntelliJ Platform Plugin Template for more information about the advantages of this approach and instructions on how to use it.

Plugin Development Workflow

• Creating a Gradle-based Plugin Project

• Configuring the Gradle IntelliJ Plugin

  • Adding Kotlin Support

• Publishing a Plugin