Question: project status

[youribonnaffe]

Hi,

Thanks for creating this project. I find it interesting as it solves the issue with running the Intellij formatter while having an instance running on your machine, and also can help shipping and sharing formatter settings within a team.

Are you still maintaining this project?

It would be nice to upgrade the packaged version of Intellij to the latest one. To keep up with recent features in different languages.

I've tried and managed (with much pain) to use Intellij 2025.3.1. However along the way I probably diminished most of the efforts you put in to limit the size of the re-packaged IDE. I'm happy to open a PR for that though.

I wished Intellij had a lightweight version of the IDE or even a library to let you use just the formatting part. I made some experiments along these lines but I quickly got lost over the complexity of the project.

For a developer only usage, it could be interesting to support running Intellij from your local installation too, like spotless recently added support for (that's how I came to discover this project by the way diffplug/spotless#2545 (comment)). This way you would avoid downloading a large JAR file.

Additionally it would be great to distribute the plugin on Maven Central. I'm wondering if Intellij license allows that though (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/docs/intellij/intellij-platform.html seems to suggest you should be able to create custom distributions, like Android Studio).

[mschieder]

Yes, I will continue working on this project. Please open a pull request for the IDEA version upgrade.
I will create separate tickets for each of your questions/comments.

[youribonnaffe]

Thanks.

I was trying to tidy up my changes, and to use the latest latest version and then all the packaging, modules, plugins, JARs changed again....

[youribonnaffe]

I tried another approach to extract the formatting part of the IDE and run it in a lighter way.

Using the Intellij Platform/support for writing tests I was able to get a Gradle project, that downloads dependencies using the Gradle Plugin.

Then reusing some the test fixtures, I can run start the IDE from a main class and format a file.

To package it as a single JAR and ease distribution is still messy, Intellij has resources (plugin.xml for instance) that end up colliding when you build a uber JAR. What I did is that I packaged everything as a JAR of JARs, and used a custom classloader to support this. It also means there is no need to extract the ide.zip before execution.

With that I have a single JAR file that can be executed to format files. The JAR of JARs makes the startup is bit slower because there is 2 levels of zip files but on the other end, the IDE startup in test mode is probably faster than a regular IDE.

Currently the resulting JAR is quite big (350MB) but maintaining it should be easier, because it relies on Intellij Platform. Additionally with the custom classloader, we can see all the loaded classes and resources, so we could use that to trim the resulting JAR.

To some extent it could also mean that the formatter could run as a library, instead of a separate process. Although considering how messy it is, I'm not sure it would be a good idea.

[mschieder]

Yes, this approach sounds promising. I will focus on implementing a classloader for tracing all loaded classes (similar -Xlog:class+load=info) and resources.

[youribonnaffe]

-Dsun.misc.URLClassPath.debug=true might give you that out of the box too with Intellij PathClassLoader.

[youribonnaffe]

I've put together a sample project using Intellij platform to package a all in one JAR: https://github.com/youribonnaffe/intellij-format-cli