Contributing to the IntelliJ Platform

Participate in Newsgroups and Forums

There are several community forums and newsgroups available for discussing the IntelliJ Platform and IDEs. The forums are an excellent source for users and contributors interested in having technical discussions, answering questions, or resolving potential issues for newcomers.

Link to IntelliJ Platform Homepage

The success of any open-source project depends on the number of people who use the product and contribute back to the project. Linking to https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea increases the chances of a new user or contributor finding out about the project and joining the community.

Project logos and other assets are available.

Promote IntelliJ Platform

Help promote the platform and IDE on a blog, Twitter, Facebook, or by submitting an article to a favorite local magazine. Members of other open-source communities can mention IntelliJ IDEA on their discussion forums or at conferences. The more developers use IntelliJ IDEA, the more bugs will be caught, the more plugins will be written, the more visible the project, and the more benefits the community will get.

Write Documents

New articles about IntelliJ IDEA features as well as documentation for the IntelliJ Platform are always welcome. Write tutorials, how-tos, sample applications, or articles about experience with the IntelliJ Platform. Publish the documentation on a website/blog or submit a pull request to the SDK Docs.

Produce Screencasts

Screencasts have recently become very popular as a way to show other developers how to use the tool effectively. Record a screencast about a particular feature or use case worth sharing with the community.

File a Bug Report

Bug reports take little time to file and are very helpful to developers. This is one of the easiest contributions to make. Please report any problem found in the IDE or the platform. Make sure to provide information about the environment (available from the About menu), steps to reproduce the issue, as well as a written description of the problem. File a bug in the YouTrack issue tracker. Before submitting an issue, please search for already submitted ones describing the same problem — and if there is one, feel free to vote for it.

Help Triage Existing Bug Reports

Over the years, users have submitted thousands of issues to the IntelliJ IDEA issue tracker. Many of the unresolved issues are no longer applicable to the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA, are duplicates, or require additional information to be resolved. Leaving comments notifying about the status of such issues helps the team keep the issue tracker clean and useful for everyone.

Write a Plugin

One of the best ways to contribute a larger piece of code, adding extra functionality to IntelliJ IDEA or any of the other IntelliJ Platform-based IDEs, is by writing a plugin. Submit the plugin to the JetBrains Marketplace to make it available for all users. Plugin authors keep control over the code and don't need to sign the contribution agreement.

Submit a Patch

To improve the code in the IntelliJ Platform or the core functionality of IntelliJ IDEA, submit a pull request to the IntelliJ Platform repository on GitHub. When preparing the change, please make sure to follow the IntelliJ Platform Coding Guidelines. A developer will review the contribution and, if it meets the quality criteria and fits well with the rest of the code, notify the contributor about the acceptance of the patch.

Looking for issues to work on? Issues marked with the #patch_welcome tag are looking for external contributors.

Alternatively, attach a patch to the ticket in the YouTrack bug database. Either file a new issue with the patch attached or attach a patch to an issue submitted by another user. In this case, sign the JetBrains Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to complete the contribution.

Become a Committer

Developers with a long history of submitting high-quality patches can gain direct commit rights.