How to debug third-party Intellij IDEA plugin?

Question

So, I am using a plugin from the Intellij IDEA Marketplace and I'd like to modify it to my needs. The plugin is Open Source(Apache License) but I couldn't find its source code on the internet. I know that plugins are located under Users directory in Windows, so I could decompile the jar and see the source code. But the problem is that this plugin contains some dll files as well.

Is there an easy way to debug the plugin and set breakpoints etc. to see where I will need to modify the code(the other option would be to include the decompiled java source files in a new plugin build but I don't know what to do with the existing dll files).

Thank you.

Answer 1

Intellij Idea plugin development requires a project structure and it requires gradle-intellij-plugin . If you are able to compile the source code, you have to create gradle project with gradle-intellij-plugin. First of all follow the links to create a small plugin to understand how to create a plugin.

https://www.jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/tutorials/build_system.html

As a sample project, you can refer below the github project.

https://github.com/debjava/ddlab-gitpusher-idea