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Develop plugins for CLion

Last modified: 08 October 2024

When you miss certain functionality in CLion, you may consider writing your own plugin. This article is intended to help you grasp the basics of the IntelliJ Platform plugin development and guide you through the very first steps of implementing your CLion plugin.

Any CLion plugin is an extension to the IntelliJ Platform, so in general it is a specific Java project. There are two supported workflows for IntelliJ plugin development: either using gradle-intellij-plugin with Gradle as a build system (the recommended way) or DevKit with the IntelliJ IDEA’s own build system.

As an IDE for your plugin development, use IntelliJ IDEA Community or Ultimate edition.

Apart from the IntelliJ IDEA itself, you will need a target CLion distribution. With the Gradle-based approach, it can be downloaded automatically by the build script. In case of using DevKit, make sure to install CLion manually.