intellij-sdk-code-samples/basics/plugin_structure/plugin_dependencies.md

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Plugin Dependencies

In your plugin, you may depend on classes from other plugins, either bundled, third-party or your own. In order to do so, you need to perform the following two steps:

• Add the jars of the plugin you're depending on to the classpath of your IntelliJ Platform SDK. Note: Don't add the plugin jars as a library: this will fail at runtime because IntelliJ Platform will load two separate copies of the dependency plugin classes.

• Add a <depends> tag to your plugin.xml, adding the ID of the plugin you're depending on as the contents of the tag. For example:

<depends>org.jetbrains.idea.maven</depends>

To find out the ID of the plugin you're depending on, locate the META-INF/plugin.xml file inside its jar and check the contents of the <id> tag.