Add CI with "nightly" Build Artifact Compatible to Latest IntelliJ Version

I’m submitting a …

• feature request
• potential offer of PR for request

What is the current behavior?

When Intellij increments versions (i.e. 2020.2->3), it breaks gitflow4idea and other plugins.

There is a build-it-yourself and manually install method, but the friction likely causes many to choose between the latest IDE and gitflow4idea. It has driven me back to the terminal which I’ve largely managed to automate away from.

This friction can cause pressure to build for releases that validate to new versions, even if the project is not ready.

What is the proposed behavior?

An automated CI workflow that:

• Performs IntelliJ Platform Plugin Verification
• Automatically detects and sets the most recent version of intellij['version'] in build.gradle
• Builds an update of the plugin that can be installed using the Install Plugin from Disk method.
• Uploads the update to the gitflow4idea repo’s packages directory
• Updates a wiki page with a direct link to download the package and the above linked instructions.

What is the motivation / use case for changing the behavior?

• Reduce pressure on maintainer(s) to constantly stay on top of new intellij releases
• Create insurance against delays from Intellij in approval and listing plugin version updates
• Provide “easy” use of plugin between releases to those using the newest IDE
• Stub out a CI that can perform more complex operations, including issue management, automated code update and PR creation (such as detect for new intellj version, and create PR with gradle updated and a PR for it)

Please tell me about your environment:

I use this plugin on pycharm every day. I have experience building useful CI workflows using Github Actions.

Other information

I like cats 🐈 but I think that may be okay. Puppies are cute too.

[banagale]

Great. I should have some time this week, squished around the holiday. Thanks for this update.

[OpherV]

@banagale Did some more research on this.

After speaking with @hsz, turns out such IntelliJ actually starting providing some sort of tooling for this since I last checked: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-ui-test-robot

If you can get some sort of POC running where we have a Github Action that spools up Idea and runs an example test I could take it from there and write all the necessary tests, so we could push for automatic building.