CLion
 
2021.1
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Plugins

Last modified: 17 June 2021

Plugins extend the core functionality of CLion. For example, by installing plugins, you can get the following features:

  • integration with version control systems, Docker, Kubernetes, and other technologies

  • coding assistance support for various languages and frameworks

  • shortcut hints, live previews, file watchers, and so on

  • coding exercises that can help you to learn a new programming language

The following video gives a short overview of the plugin subsystem.

Open plugin settings

  • In the Settings/Preferences dialog Ctrl+Alt+S, select Plugins.

The Plugins settings dialog

Use the Marketplace tab to browse and install plugins from the JetBrains Plugin Repository or from a custom plugin repository.

Use the Installed tab to browse installed plugins, enable, disable, update, or remove them. Disabling unnecessary plugins can increase performance.

Most plugins can be used with any JetBrains product. Some are limited only to commercial products. There are also plugins that require a separate license.

If a plugin depends on some other plugin, CLion will notify you about the dependencies. If your project depends on certain plugins, add them to the list of required plugins.

If existing plugins do not provide some functionality that you need, you can create your own plugin for CLion. For more information, see Develop plugins for CLion.

By default, CLion includes a number of bundled plugins. You can disable bundled plugins, but they cannot be removed. You can install additional plugins from the plugin repository or from a local archive file (ZIP or JAR).

Install plugin from repository

Install plugin from disk

Remove plugin

Disable plugin

Custom plugin repositories

By default, CLion is configured to use plugins from the JetBrains Plugin Repository. This is where all the community plugins are hosted, and you are free to host your plugins there. However, if you develop plugins for internal use only, you can set up a custom plugin repository for them.

For information about setting up a custom plugin repository, see the IntelliJ Platform SDK documentation.

Once you set up your plugin repository, add it to CLion:

To browse the custom plugin repository, type repository: followed by the URL of the repository in the Marketplace tab of the Plugins page. For example:

Alternatively, you can replace the default JetBrains Plugin Repository with your custom repository URL. This can be helpful if you want only your custom repository plugins to be available from CLion. To do this, edit the platform properties or VM options file as described below. For more information, see Advanced configuration.

Use a custom plugin repository

If you replace the default plugin repository with a custom one, the search field on the Marketplace tab of the Plugins dialog will browse only the plugins in your custom repository.

Required plugins

A project may require plugins that provide support for certain technologies or frameworks. You can add such plugins to the list of required plugins for the current project, so that CLion will verify that the plugins are installed and enabled. It will notify you if you forget about some plugin, or someone on your team is not aware about the dependency as they work on the project.

Add a required plugin for your current project

  1. Make sure that the required plugin is installed.

  2. Press Ctrl+Alt+S to open IDE settings and select Build, Execution, Deployment | Required Plugins.

  3. On the Required Plugins page, click The Add icon and select the plugin. Optionally, specify the minimum and maximum version of the plugin.

    Add required plugin dialog

tip

To specify the required version of CLion itself, add IDE Core to the list of required plugins.

After the required plugin is added, when you open the project in CLion, it will notify you if the plugin is disabled, not installed, or requires an update.

Click the link in the notification message to quickly enable, install, or update the required plugin.

Productivity tips

Filter and sort search results

  • Type a forward slash / in the search string to see options for filtering and sorting search results. For example, you can add the following options to your search string to list only language-related plugins and sort them by the number of downloads:

    /tag:Languages /sortBy:downloads