[ An IntelliJ plugin for working with buck-based code ]

Periodically, major/minor ideabuck release builds are posted to JetBrains...

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7826-buck-for-idea

...and can be downloaded/installed using the usual mechanisms. Versions posted there have undergone reasonable amounts of in-house testing and are almost certainly reasonable for general use.

Patch releases of ideabuck typically aren't published there, to avoid being a distraction during high-churn periods of internal development, although it is fairly straightforward for anyone with a viable buck executable to build/install it locally.

The output of the target buck//tools/ideabuck:ideabuck is a jar file suitable for installation as an IntelliJ plugin. (For convenience, the build alias ideabuck expands to this target.)

The ideabuck plugin is also compatible with Android Studio, and may work in other JetBrains IDEs (like PyCharm, CLion, etc.). To install it, take note of the artifact location:

buck build ideabuck --show-output

And from IntelliJ's Plugin Preferences, install the plugin from that file.

If you wish, you may build it directly into your IDE's plugin directory. For example, on a Mac running IntelliJ 2018.3 Community Edition:

buck build ideabuck --out ~/Library/Application\ Support/IdeaIC2018.3/ideabuck.jar

Tip: To pick a commit where features are most likely to be stable and field-tested, look at the history of ideabuck's plugin.xml commit with a non-SNAPSHOT <version>.

The ideabuck artifact is a standard IntelliJ plugin, built with buck. To enable buck to compile against IntelliJ's jar files, a stripped down version of IntelliJ's ABIs are stored in buck//third-party/java/intellij/....

Note: to develop the plugin, one need not necessarily use (or have a copy of) IntelliJ or buck, although pragmatically it is nearly impossible to do any meaningful development without both.

1. Use buck to build ideabuck and its dependencies: buck build ideabuck). This not only builds the ideabuck plugin, but also builds some buck artifacts that shared by both buck and ideabuck.
2. Launch IntelliJ, open the buck project.
3. Create an IntelliJ Plugin Development SDK called "IDEA SDK". This can be done from the "Project Structure..." dialog, under "Platform Settings > SDKs".
4. Import the IntelliJ module file at tools/ideabuck/ideabuck.iml.

Note: when buck's dependencies change, you may have to repeat step (1).

Importing the ideabuck.iml module and defining an IntelliJ Plugin Development SDK allows you to run/debug ideabuck using the usual method: create a "Plugin" run configuration for the ideabuck module.

Testing ideabuck can be very tricky. There are two categories of tests: "unit" tests which can be run in either Buck or IntelliJ, and "integration" tests that only run in a full IntelliJ environment.

Continuous integration processes run the "unit" tests, but developers must (currently) take responsibility for running the "integration" tests locally, using an existing IntelliJ installation.

Note: many of the "integration" tests are very unit-test-like. They live in the "integration" folder because they require the actual IntelliJ implementations, which aren't present in the skeleton libraries actually checked into the buck repo.