Developing Mevenide IDEA

Intended audience

This document is intended for developers and contributors participating in the development of Mevenide IDEA.

Requirements

Please make sure you read and understand the Building Mevenide IDEA document.

Custom IDEA goals

Since it is tedious to always execute maven dist each time you want to build Mevenide IDEA and test your changes, we've defined some useful goals (defined in maven.xml) which simplify the development process.

Required properties

To use these goals, however, you will have to define two properties in your ~/build.properties:

idea.home: points to the directory where you have installed your IntelliJ IDEA.
idea.sandbox.dir: points to the IDEA sandbox directory. While developing, you will actually run IDEA as a normal Java application. Since you wouldn't want the mocked IDEA to look in your standard IDEA settings directory (usually .IntelliJ under your home directory), you can tell IDEA to look at a custom settings directory - the sandbox.

Note

The idea.sandbox.dir property is optional, and defaults to ${basedir}/sandbox.

Available goals

Goal	Description	Comments
idea:clean	Cleans the IDEA sandbox directory.	Deletes the sandbox directory.
idea:copy-license	Copies your existing IDEA license to your sandbox directory.	Since IDEA looks for your license file when it starts up, it will also do it when you run it during development. Therefor you must make sure the license file does exist in your sandbox directory while you develop (or after you run idea:clean).
idea:install	Installs the plugin in the IDEA sandbox directory.	Compiles and JARs the plugin, then updates (if necessary) the sandbox to contain the new plugin JAR as well as its dependencies. This goal will also try to copy your license to the sandbox directory by calling idea:copy-license.
idea:run	Builds and installs the plugin in the IDEA sandbox, and runs IDEA.	Installs the plugin in the sandbox directory by calling idea:install, and then runs the IDEA process.
idea:debug	Builds and installs the plugin in the IDEA sandbox, and runs IDEA in debug mode (JPDA).	Same as idea:run, only runs IDEA in JPDA mode (default JPDA port is 4795).

Enjoy!