Problems building and verifying plugin for 2025.1

IntelliJ Platform
1

A bit of context: I just decided to increase the max supported version of my plugin, which used to build fine in the past (however the json issue listed in plugin verification was never solved). I’m not able to build/verify the plugin at all now (see point 3 below).
All in all the flow is pretty frustrating. It is expected to encounter issues with major updates, but as can be seen below, the problems are mostly systematic: version/dependency hell, fragile/bloated build system causing useless error messages..

Developing IDE plugins is incredibly painful, mainly due to the following points:

  1. IDE versioning is still very confusing and problematic. I cannot effectively build, run or verify a plugin just by providing “simple” versions like “2025.1” or “251”. I need to search - most of the time arbitrarily - for a build version that satisfies all requirements. For example, I ended up picking a version from here, despite that the json module is supposed to be bundled. (Figure 1)
  2. Defining requirements/dependencies is confusing… official comments say that the version is not required, but without it it won’t build. (Figure 2)
  3. Gradle always acts up, and the IDE provides 0 useful information. (Figure 3)

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Right now I’m still blocked by point 3, which I’m totally clueless about.

Steps to reproduce

  1. open the project at GitHub - uuf6429/jetbrains-php-version-switcher: PHP Version Switcher Plugin for PhpStorm/IDEA
  2. Try getting it to verify

Environment

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.1 (Ultimate Edition)

Build #IU-251.23774.435, built on April 14, 2025

Windows 11.0

2

I tracked down the issue here:

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(there is no ‘=’ in the string, causing the undefined index error)

3

Possibly relevant: Execution failed for task :buildSearchableOptions: Index: 1, Size: 1.

Are you using IntelliJ Platform Gradle Plugin 2.1.0 or lower?

1 Like
4

I had a similar issue, switching to the latest gradle plugin resolved the problem.

1 Like
5

Just wasted half an hour fiddling with IDE settings and configs to find that gradle version is controlled by distributionUrl in gradle-wrapper.properties.

It’s beyond me how gradle is in such a state and no one seems to be doing anything about it. :frowning:

'kay.. that didn’t help, I guess I really need to change some “gradle plugin”… problem is I can’t find any references to that at all.

6

I’ve figured it out - I had to change the version of the "org.jetbrains.intellij.platform" dependency.

So as I understand, this was a massive waste of time, since in the end I didn’t have to change a single line of code in my plugin. Incredibly painful to work with. :confused: