When building a plugin on the IntelliJ Platform SDK, occasionally major version upgrades may cause breaking API changes. In order to prevent this from occurring unexpectedly, we recommend using Gradle with the gradle-intellij-plugin. This Gradle plugin allows you to build plugins for the IntelliJ Platform on a specific version of the IntelliJ Platform SDK.
Additionally, it codifies a reproducible build process for compiling a plugin, running it inside your IDE, and finally publishing it on the plugin repo. The following tutorial refers to materials that can be found in the included gradle_plugin_demo project. Below are a series of guides to configure Gradle support.