At my current job everyone is using eclipse and ivy is the standard dependency manager. I’ve used eclipse as well for the last months, but it could never make me forget IntelliJ IDEA. Too bad IntelliJ still lacks ivy support though…

There are a few plugins around that add (some) ivy support to IntelliJ IDEA but I wasn’t able to get them to work properly; they seem to be written for a specific situation or are a pain to configure.

All of this got me to the point where I started working on my own plugin: IvyIDEA. At first I started out with a quick and dirty way of adding dependencies from a certain folder into a module library in IntelliJ. After a few days and nights of development, I now have it integrated with the ivy resolve functionality. It detects source and document types and adds them as such. As a bonus (and because I was curious how it worked) I also added an IvyIDEA facet in intellij, meaning that ivy.xml files are autodetected and configured to be recognized by the plugin.

It is still very rough around the edges (the exception handling is non-existing and there currently is no output console to see what’s going on during the resolve process) but I use it daily in my job and I hope to have a good enough version ready soon to add to the IntelliJ plugin repository.

If you can’t wait until then, you can always download the source code and compile it on your own from www.ivyidea.org. If you have feature requests, bug reports or comments, please let me know!

Update 2008-10-19: I just saw that JetBrains is organizing an IntelliJ plugin contest, and I decided to submit IvyIDEA as an entry. They suggested to publish a version as early as possible so I decided to already publish a first alpha version to the plugin repository. This means that you can now install the first rough-around-the-edges alpha version using the plugin manager in IntelliJ if you like.