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intellij-plugin

Shipping OS-specific binaries in an IntelliJ plugin

I am evaluating the creation of an IntelliJ IDEA plugin which would ship OS-specific binaries, for macOS, Linux and Windows.

The binaries are fairly large, so I don't want to ship binaries for the 3 OS in the same plugin archive. Is it possible to create OS-specific zip archives for an IntelliJ plugin?

Solution

  • It's not possible to make 3 different binaries for the one plugin.

    Different approaches you can take:

    1. 3 different plugins. Shared code can be put in a different code module

    2. The plugin downloads the binary upon startup from a private server (ftp / nexus)

    3. Install the binaries separately, and have the plugin find the binaries via an environment variable

    Good luck!