Legal news: plugin license is required for all plugins

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

With the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) coming into action last week, in addition to some of the compliance-related changes which were introduced earlier, there has been a change to the way plugins and their updates are uploaded to the plugins repository.

From May 24, 2018, it is a requirement to specify a valid license URL for your plugins. Please provide a valid license URL for your plugins at your earliest convenience.

  • A License URL for new plugins should be provided on the upload form.
  • For existing plugins, it is not possible to upload a new update to the plugin unless the License URL is provided on the Edit Plugin page. If you are using an API to upload the plugin update and the license is not specified, an error will be returned until the License URL is provided in the plugins repository interface.

license_upload_form

The owner or creator of the plugin decides what EULA (end-user license agreement) should apply to the plugin and its updates. Unfortunately, JetBrains can’t tell you what your plugin’s Developer EULA should say because it will largely depend on your choice of how to license the plugin, and how to use personal data, etc. However, we can give you some pointers, e.g., Open Source licenses and various independent EULA generators (not affiliated with JetBrains).

Should you have any questions, please ask them to us here in the comments, post them to @JBPlatform Twitter, or drop us an email at plugins-admin@jetbrains.com.

Posted in IntelliJ Platform, Plugin Repository, TeamCity Platform | Tagged , | 1 Comment

JetBrains Hub now used for authentication in the plugin repository

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

icon_HubAs of today’s release, JetBrains Hub is used for a unified authentication in the JetBrains plugin repository. Hub is our user and team management solution that we utilize internally, and now it serves as a user and permission model for the plugin repository.

We have moved from the direct authentication and accessing user profiles via JBA (JetBrains Account) in order to provide seamless integration with other JetBrains tools that are already using Hub for authentication. In addition, we will be able to build some exciting features in the nearest future relying on the already available Hub functionality, such as API auth via tokens, groups of users, etc.

A new authentication method is already live on plugins.jetbrains.com, and we don’t expect any issues on your side, as it is connected to the previously connected authentication method.

Should you have any issues with accessing your plugins or comments, please make sure that you have your JBA (JetBrains Account) connected to the Hub Account in the Hub interface.

If you encounter any issues, do send them to us here in comments, post to @JBPlatform Twitter, or drop us an email at plugins-admin@jetbrains.com.

JetBrains Hub is available as a product, too. Here’s where you can learn more about Hub.

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New Code Style API in Intellij IDEA 2018.1

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Matt Ellis

IntelliJ 2018.1 introduces a new API that we want to make plugin authors aware of. We’re changing the way you retrieve Code Style settings (such as formatting options) so that you can provide a PsiFile, instead of a Project. The ultimate goal is to support different code style settings per scope, rather than per project (see IDEA-69685).

As a bonus, the new API provides a shorter form for getting code style. So, for example, instead of writing CodeStyleSettings.getSettings(project).getCommonSettings(language) you can now simply write CodeStyle.getLanguageSettings(file).

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The great module rename in the IntelliJ IDEA codebase

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Nikolay Chashnikov

We’ve just pushed a major naming change to the IntelliJ codebase. For years, we hadn’t set or followed any naming conventions for modules in the IntelliJ IDEA source, and things had gotten into a total mess (for example, we had a variety of names such as  hg4idea, jetgroovy, ByteCodeViewer, testng_rt, and lang-impl). As usage of IntelliJ Platform grows, this has been causing more and more problems.

So now we’ve finally put all names of modules in IntelliJ IDEA and IntelliJ Platform sources in order. This means that all 357 modules in the intellij-community project have been renamed.

This doesn’t affect binary distributions of IntelliJ-based IDEs, as JAR filenames haven’t been changed.

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SVNKit library is removed from the platform

Posted on January 17, 2018 by Dmitriy Smirnov

IntelliJ 2018.1 removes the support of svn integration via SVNKit. The library is also removed from the platform dependencies and is no longer available for plugins. Now a command-line svn client is the only way to integrate with svn and execute svn-commands.

We made our best to maintain compatibility, however, some breakages could not be avoided. API changes are described at http://www.jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/reference_guide/api_changes_list.html

Here is the list of the affected plugins known to us (plugins from the Plugin repository):

SVN Revision Graph https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/6178-svn-revision-graph
SourceFinder https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7130-sourcefinder
VCS Revision Graph https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/1832-vcs-revision-graph
CollabNet Tools https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7116-collabnet-tools
Review board https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7872-review-board
HP ALI https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/6930-hp-ali
Test Recorder https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9394-test-recorder
SVNToolBox https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7321-svntoolbox
z2-environment https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7470-z2-environment
Review board plugin for IntelliJ idea https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10241-review-board-plugin-for-intellij-idea

We notified authors and sent pull requests with required changes for the plugins, but it could happen there are some plugins outside the repository which rely on SVNKit. If you own such, please update accordingly.

SVNKit was removed due to several reasons, mainly because it is only used to work with old svn 1.6 working copy format, thus bringing a little value to our users.

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Plugin Downloads Statistics: recent changes

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

The Plugins Repository serves more than 200,000 downloads of plugins every 24 hours, which can easily double or triple during the major releases. It was starting to become quite a challenge for us to keep, process and display all the data since 2012, which is when we started counting downloads continuously and keeping all the history.

As the IntelliJ Platform matured, the number of plugins and their downloads drastically increased. Our old statistics mechanism (keeping everything on the Plugins Repository web application side in a MySQL database) started failing us, and there were some drawbacks in the user interface and the calculations, as well as some performance issues.

As an effort to improve the experience, we have completely reworked the way we handle plugin downloads statistics. The major changes included:

  • Using CDN access logs as the data source instead of an application-side event;
  • Shifting ownership of the data to the internal JetBrains statistics team;
  • Updating the user interface.

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Plugin Downloads Statistics Discrepancies in January 2018: post-mortem

Posted on January 9, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

As some plugin developers and end-users noticed, there were some discrepancies in both total downloads counts and the detailed plugin downloads statistics available to plugin developers – there was an unusual spike of downloads at the beginning of January 2018.

We started investigating these reports on the morning of 8th January 2018 (CET timezone), and it was fully resolved by the end of the day.

Our investigation showed that our new statistics processing scripts didn’t survive the New Year due to a minor bug, and hadn’t been providing correct numbers from the 2nd of January 2018 onwards (adding the previous stats on top of the current day).

We quickly fixed the scripts and recalculated all the statistics for affected days. The issue should not happen again in the future.

In addition to the fix, we also prepared a “backup solution” as part of the Plugin Repository application. The backup solution allows us to “delay” statistics from a specific date so that it doesn’t break total download counters (which is the most significant impact, as this affects plugin recommendations). We will keep this backup solution in place so that it can be used instantly in case of similar issues.

Thank you for all your reports, and we are sorry for the inconvenience caused.

If you have any suggestions or issues, feel free to send them to us here in comments, post to @JBPlatform Twitter, or drop us an email at plugins-admin@jetbrains.com.

Posted in General, Plugin Repository | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Export IntelliJ editor themes as plugins

Posted on December 4, 2017 by Matt Ellis

Today, I’d like to highlight a small but very useful feature for IDEs based on the IntelliJ Platform – exporting editor colour schemes as plugins. That’s right, if you have a custom editor scheme defined, you can get your favourite IntelliJ-based IDE to export it as a plugin .jar file, complete with plugin metadata, and upload it directly to the Plugin Repository for others to install and enjoy.

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Posted in IntelliJ Platform, Plugin Repository | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Migrating IntelliJ’s build to use Maven project libraries

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Matt Ellis

Historically, all libraries used for building IntelliJ have been stored, as JAR files, directly in the IntelliJ git repositories. This approach has several downsides, such as increasing the size of the git repo whenever we need to update to a new version. Also, who wants to manually manage dependencies and versions these days? We’ve recently made some changes to try and improve this situation.

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Posted in IntelliJ Platform | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Improvements in Testing IntelliJ Platform Plugins

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Matt Ellis

Some good news for plugin developers – starting in IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3 EAP 173.2463.16, we’re introducing some improvements and fixes to working with test data. Let’s take a look at what’s new.

For those that don’t know, the IntelliJ Platform comes with a test framework we can use to test language features added by plugins. The tests themselves are functional tests – we run an in-memory, headless version of the IDE that can load test data, such as projects and source files, execute a feature on those files (such as highlighting) and then compare the output of the feature with known good files. If the files match, the test passes. If they don’t, the test fails. More details on this approach can be found in the SDK documentation.

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