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Cooperative Environment Guide

plugins/kotlin/docs/cooperative-development/environment-setup.md

2025.3-rc-23.5 KB
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Cooperative Environment Guide

The Kotlin plugin for IntelliJ IDEA is built on top of the Kotlin compiler and the Kotlin Analysis API. To improve the pace of development and bug fix delivery, compiler artifacts in the master branch of IntelliJ IDEA are regularly advanced to match the state of the Kotlin compiler's master.

Keeping development branches of two different repositories synchronized is problematic. Instead, we use a buffer branch, kt-master, which is aligned with commits from the Kotlin compiler's master. Approximately every week, this branch is two-way synchronized with the master branch of IntelliJ IDEA.

In the kt-master branch, we accumulate changes that depend on the latest commits in the compiler repository. These are a minority of all changes in the Kotlin plugin — most of them are related either to new language features or to changes in the Analysis API. All other changes simply go into the master branch.

──▲────▲────▲────▲────► master
  │    │    │    │
──▼────▼────▼────▼────► kt-master
  1w   1w   1w   1w

To simplify the development process, we provide the cooperative environment — a way of setting up the Kotlin and IntelliJ IDEA projects so it becomes possible to work on both simultaneously.

Setup

If you are not changing the Kotlin compiler, you don't need to set up the cooperative environment.
Submit your pull request directly to the master branch of IntelliJ IDEA.

  1. Clone the Kotlin repository.
  2. Clone the intellij-community repository (or ultimate for JetBrains developers).
  3. Set up both repositories (README for Kotlin, README for IntelliJ IDEA).
  4. Switch to the kt-master branch of the IntelliJ repository.
  5. In the IntelliJ repository, create the local.properties file in plugins/kotlin/util/project-model-updater of intellij-community.
  6. In the created file, specify the path to the Kotlin repository: kotlinCompilerRepoPath=/path/to/kotlin. The path can be absolute or relative to the IntelliJ's project root directory.
  7. Run the Kotlin Coop: Publish Compiler JARs run configuration (Run menu -> Run…) — it will assemble all required artifacts and put them into lib/kotlin-snapshot.
  8. You should now be able to compile the IntelliJ project normally.

Now, whenever you change something in the Kotlin repository, run Kotlin Coop: Publish Compiler JARs again so the changes propagate to IntelliJ IDEA.

As an alternative, you can clone IntelliJ IDEA into the intellij directory of the Kotlin repository. In this case, you can avoid specifying the path to the Kotlin repository in the local.properties file. The folder structure should look like this:

kotlin [branch = master]
├── intellij [branch = kt-master]
│   └── ...
└── ...

The setup is simpler, but it ties both projects together. If you usually work on both projects separately, you may want to choose to specify the Kotlin repository path explicitly.

Contributing to kt-master

Submit pull requests to both the Kotlin and IntelliJ IDEA repositories, adding cross-links between them. Ideally, use the same branch name in both repositories. The Kotlin team will review and merge pull requests manually.