Publishing Plugins with Gradle

Once you have configured Gradle support, you can automatically build and deploy your plugin to the JetBrains Plugin Repository. To automatically deploy a plugin, you need to have already published the plugin to the plugin repository at least once. Please see the guide page for manually publishing a plugin for the first time.

• Building Distribution
• Providing Your Hub Permanent Token to Gradle
  • Using Gradle Properties
  • Using Environment Variables
  • Using Parameters for the Gradle Task
• Deploying a Plugin with Gradle
  • Publishing a Plugin
  • Specifying a Release Channel

Building Distribution

For manual distribution or local installation, invoke gradle buildPlugin target to create the plugin distribution. The resulting JAR/ZIP is located in build/distributions and can then be installed manually.

Providing Your Hub Permanent Token to Gradle

To deploy a plugin to the plugin repository, you need to supply your JetBrains Hub Permanent Token. This page describes three options to supply your Hub Permanent Token via Gradle using:

• Gradle properties,
• Environment variables,
• Parameters to the Gradle task.

Using Gradle Properties

You can store the Hub Token in Gradle properties.

If you place a gradle.properties file containing your Hub Permanent Token in your project’s root directory, please ensure your version control tool ignores this file. For example in Git, you can add the following line to your .gitignore file:

To add the Hub Token to a Gradle properties file, place the following information in:

• The file GRADLE_HOME/gradle.properties,
• Or inside a file called gradle.properties under your project’s root directory.

Then refer to these values in publishPlugin task in your build.gradle file:

Using Environment Variables

Alternatively, and possibly slightly safer because you cannot accidentally commit your token to version control, you can provide your token via an environment variable. For example, start by defining an environment variable such as:

Now provide the environment variable in the run configuration with which you run the publishPlugin task locally. To do so, create a Gradle run configuration (if not already done), choose your Gradle project, specify the publishPlugin task, and then add the environment variable.

Note that you still need to put some default values (can be empty) in the Gradle properties because otherwise, you will get a compilation error.

Using Parameters for the Gradle Task

Similar to using environment variables, you can also pass your token as a parameter to the Gradle task. For example, you can to provide the parameter -Dorg.gradle.project.intellijPublishToken=YOUR_HUB_TOKEN_HERE on the command line or by putting it in the arguments of your run configuration.

Note that also, in this case, you still need to put some default values in your Gradle properties.

Deploying a Plugin with Gradle

The first step when deploying a plugin is to confirm that it works correctly. You may wish to verify this by installing your plugin from disk on a fresh instance of your target IDE(s).

Publishing a Plugin

Once you are confident the plugin works as intended, make sure the plugin version is updated, as the JetBrains Plugin repository won’t accept multiple artifacts with the same version. To deploy a new version of your plugin to the JetBrains plugin repository, execute the following Gradle command:

Now check the most recent version of your plugin appears on the Plugin Repository. If successfully deployed, any users who currently have your plugin installed on an eligible version of the IntelliJ Platform are notified of a new update available on the following restart.

Specifying a Release Channel

You may also deploy plugins to a release channel of your choosing, by configuring the publishPlugin.channels property. For example:

When empty, this uses the default plugin repository, available to all JetBrains plugin repository users. However, you can publish to an arbitrarily-named channel. These non-default release channels are treated as separate repositories. When using a non-default release channel, users need to add a new custom plugin repository to install your plugin. For example, if you specify publishPlugin.channels 'canary', then users need to add the https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugins/canary/list repository to install the plugin and receive updates. Popular channel names include:

• alpha: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugins/alpha/list
• beta: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugins/beta/list
• eap: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugins/eap/list

More information about the available configuration options is in the documentation of the intellij gradle plugin.