JMeter Source Code in IntelliJ IDEA 2016

August 21, 2015

I’ve recently switched to using JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA and I wanted to get the JMeter source code working to contribute some bug fixes to the JMeter project.

Steps

These are the steps for IntelliJ IDEA 15 (but should work for 2016.x):

Import project from Git: https://github.com/apache/jmeter.git
Select “Create project from existing sources”
Name the project
Select all source file directories
Deselect any libraries, (we will add them later)
Select all of the discovered modules
Select the SDK (you’ll need to add one if you’ve not used IntelliJ before)
Press Next and then Finish
Click the “Ant Build” menu in IntelliJ
Press add and add the build.xml file
Run the download_jars target
Open project settings (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S) then add the downloaded jars to the project:
The finished project should look something like this:
You can compile and start the GUI by executing the run_gui ant target
If there are any errors in IntelliJ when viewing files (or pressing build project) you can usually solve them by pressing alt+enter on the offending code and making the appropriate ‘module’ a dependency - however this shouldn’t stop you developing or running things via ant.

I’ve created a screencast of the above steps to import JMeter source into IntelliJ

if you prefer a visual format.