How to get the version of installed plugins via terminal?

IntelliJ Platform
1

Hi!

I’m working in a script to get some information about IntelliJ installation. I was able to get all plugins installed, looking at the plugin’s folder.
Now I want to get the version of the installed plugin, I tried to look to other folders and documentation but didn’t found anything :confused:
Is possible to get the version of the installed plugins, via a script?

EDIT:
Adding more information, e.g. in VSCode is possible to run code --list-extensions --show-versions to get version of installed extensions (plugins) or in the folder it has the version in the name of the plugin folder.

2

Could you please explain your use case? And why you collect this information outside of the IDE?

4

Sure, I’m working in an enterprise solution to get information about dev environment from devs in the company, to understand better tools that are being used, versions, etc…
So, it is a script that runs by default on users machine. It already exists, I’m now checking how to get those kind of information about IDEs and plugins.

1 Like
5

While this is mostly used internally only, this library should help inspecting plugins: intellij-plugin-verifier/intellij-plugin-structure at master · JetBrains/intellij-plugin-verifier · GitHub

This might be interesting as well as an out-of-the-box solution to manage IDEs JetBrains IDE Services – Elevating Developer Productivity to Enterprise Scale

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6

You can also extract the plugins version string from their META-INF/plugin.xml file. This will work for most (all?) third-party plugins. For each plugin lib folder find the nameOfThePlugin.jar file (the other jar files are dependencies and, optionally, the searchableOptions jar), then read the version from META-INF/plugin.xml.

You could also develop a small plugin for that. This plugin would simply export the list of installed plugin.

7

find the nameOfThePlugin.jar file […]

That is not the true always. The plugin “main” JAR file can have an arbitrary name (and will).

8

thanks! Where I can find those .jars?

9

The basic structure is explained here Plugin Content | IntelliJ Platform Plugin SDK

1 Like
10

Sure, this is not exactly the name of the plugin, but you can put some intelligence in your code :slight_smile: Normalize names, filter jars containing a plugin.xml that looks like a JB plugin…

1 Like
11

@afucher - I’m looking to do something very similar. By chance, is your work/code for this somewhere in OSS? I’d love to take a look and leverage what you’ve done as a starting point/inspiration. :folded_hands: