Intellij Maven Source Downloads

Debugging time is a blessed time in one's day where the hotkeys for continue, step into, step over, and others often grace the pads of the programmer's fingers. This can be quite a rewarding experience. Now ponder on the disappointment that materializes on the programmer's crestfallen brow when the step into button is pressed and upon the screen displays the all-descriptive and utterly useless "/** compiled code */". Maven mixed with IntelliJ to the rescue -- download the sources!

Debugging time is a blessed time in one's day where the hotkeys for continue, step into, step over, and others often grace the pads of the programmer's fingers. This can be quite a rewarding experience. Now ponder on the disappointment that materializes on the programmer's crestfallen brow when the step into button is pressed and upon the screen displays the all-descriptive and utterly useless "/** compiled code */". Maven mixed with IntelliJ to the rescue -- download the sources!

In a project with many external dependencies, this can expand your view of the code your using at least 42-fold.

Here, Maven is your friend. It's a great tool. This command led to my discovery of this gem:

mvn idea:help -Ddetail=true -Dgoal=[insert name of goal here]

And now for the awesome one... When tooling your project for IntelliJ, run this:

mvn idea:idea -DdownloadSources=true

This can also be done when you're blowing away your dependency metadata, which is stored in your project .iml file by default:

mvn idea:module -DdownloadSources=true

Enjoy that source!