The simples way to contribute to the plugin is to report issues you encounter in your day to day use.
As a rule of thumb, always keep in mind that we are developers just like you. So, whenever you are going to report an issue, think of how you'd like to receive issues for your projects. Also, we are doing this in our spare time, so the more information we have in the report, the faster we can replicate the problem and get on solving it rather that just doing a bunch of ping-pong in comments trying to extract the needed details from you.
As of 0.9.16 release, the plugin has a way to catch the exceptions it generates and send them to us as an issue on Github but we still need to understand the context in which the error happens. As such, whenever you are using the builtin error reporting facility, be as descriptive as possible.
This information applies also when you don't have an error that is caught by the builtin facility but it's something that happens and shouldn't happen (say for example, a formatting issue).
First and foremost, we really need to know the following:
- IDEA version
- OS version
- JDK version
Also, everytime you can, submit the piece of code that's generating the issue. As it might be some prorietary code, take some time and write the smallest code sample that can reproduce it and paste it in the issue (or send it as a link to Go Playground. Screenshots are useful, but, just like you, we can't copy paste code from screenshots either.
Please ensure that the bug is not reported already, this helps us focusing on working on bug fixes not triage work.
Submitting test cases is the next best thing you can do to developing on this project. In fact, you'll actually develop on it since the test code you are going to contribute is still code.
Whenever your time or knowledge allows, submitting good test cases for either for existing issues or for issues that you come across will make a huge difference in the way we spend time to understand the problems and thus solve them.
In order to be able to contribute to the plugin you need to:
- install Java JDK. Supported versions are currently from 6 onwards.
- checkout and build the IntelliJ IDEA Community source code. Preferred version is idea/139.223 (so you can have access to the platform internals in debugging and understanding what goes wrong)
- checkout out and build a recent version of Go. Preferred version is go1.3.3
- checkout and setup the plugin sources
We start with cloning the idea git repository and checking out the revision used to build IDEA 14:
git clone [email protected]:JetBrains/intellij-community.git idea
cd idea
git checkout idea/139.223
# and we build it using ant
ant
The build will take around 5 to 20 minutes (depending on the machine) and at the
end it should put the build artifacts into out/artifacts
folder.
$ ls -al out/artifacts/
total 728672
drwxr-xr-x 7 mtoader staff 238 Jun 1 22:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 8 mtoader staff 272 Jun 1 22:25 ..
drwxr-xr-x 10 mtoader staff 340 Jun 1 22:34 core
-rw-r--r-- 1 mtoader staff 112106975 Jun 1 22:34 ideaIC-139.SNAPSHOT.mac.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 mtoader staff 110192607 Jun 1 22:34 ideaIC-139.SNAPSHOT.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 mtoader staff 110468031 Jun 1 22:34 ideaIC-139.SNAPSHOT.win.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 mtoader staff 40308058 Jun 1 22:34 sources.zip
Use the artifact from your target OS to run the built version of IDEA.
While we support Go from 1.0 to 1.3.3, we prefer to work with the latest release installed from sources by following the page source installation page from here: http://golang.org/doc/install/source.
This will work even with a binary installation (as a result of following the http://golang.org/doc/install page).
If you are on the contributors list:
git clone [email protected]:go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin.git
If you are not then fork the repository using the github web interface and do a clone of your fork on the local machine.
In order to build the sources you need to download an IDEA Community version, open the project and add the built IDEA artifact as a Idea SDK for the plugin. It's also helpful to add the idea sources to the IDEA SDK as it helps tremendously with debugging.
The steps:
- Download the IDEA Community (or you can use your licensed IDEA Ultimate copy) from here: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/.
- Open the copy of google-go-lang-idea-plugin repository (that was previously checked out) with it (the default project module config should work with a recent IDEA 14 version).
- Open the Project Settings (Command + ; on Mac or File -> Project Settings on
other platforms), go to the SDKs entry, click the
+
(and select IntelliJ IDEA Plugin SDK). - If it says you need a Java SDK first. You should add a java SDK with the same version that you used for build idea. If you use mac,you should check follow path:
/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_25.jdk/Contents/
- After setup java SDK. go to the SDKs entry, click the
+
(and select IntelliJ IDEA Plugin SDK) navigate to the unzipped location of the IDEA build that you created before. It will recognize a new IDEA Plugin SDK with the nameIDEA IC-139.SNAPSHOT
. After that you should add the IDEA sources to it by selecting the SDK, going to theSourcepath
tab, clicking+
in the lower panel and navigating to the checkout out sources of IDEA. Press add, let it inspect the folders for sources and add all the found sources to the SDK. - Go to the Project entry and make sure that the Project SDK is set to selected SDK.
- Wait until the source files of the SDK are indexed.
Now you can use the run configurations provided by the plugin source code to run and play:
Execute Slave IDEA with plugin
will spawn a new IDEA with the latest version of the plugin enabled.ro.redeul.google.go in google-go-language
will run all the test cases available in the project. Please make sure that all the test cases pass before committing anything (or making a pull request).
Now you can play, add functionality and commit or make pull requests. That's it. Enjoy your play time.
- If you see a lot of java.io.FileNotFoundException when run test cases and those test cases
are passed in Travis CI, you may need to try #923.
Please look at the location:
/Users/xxx/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea14/plugins-sandbox/test
and remove the test folder from there. This usually happens when you change the directory structure in one of the tests. The testing idea will not update it's caches properly.