Experimental IDE

Drift ships with an experimental analyzer plugin that provides real-time feedback on errors, hints, folding and outline.

Features

At the moment, the IDE supports

• auto-complete to suggest matching keywords as you type
• warnings and errors for your queries
• navigation (Ctrl click on a reference to see where a column or table is declared)
• an outline view highlighting tables and queries
• folding inside CREATE TABLE statements and import-blocks

We would very much like to support syntax highlighting, but sadly VS Code doesn't support that. Please upvote this issue to help us here.

Setup

To use the plugin, you need a supported editor (see below).

First, tell the Dart analysis server to run the drift plugin. Create a file called analysis_options.yaml in your project root, next to your pubspec. It should contain this section:

analyzer:
  plugins:
    - drift

Then, follow the steps for the IDE you want to use.

Using with VS Code

To use the drift analyzer plugin in VS Code, use

1. Tell Dart Code to analyze drift files. Add this to your settings.json:

"dart.additionalAnalyzerFileExtensions": ["drift"]

2. close and re-open your IDE so that the analysis server is restarted. The analysis server will then load the drift plugin and start providing analysis results for .drift files. Loading the plugin can take some time (around a minute for the first time).

Other IDEs

Unfortunately, we can't support IntelliJ and Android Studio yet. Please vote on this issue to help us here!

As a workaround, you can configure IntelliJ to recognize drift files as sql. Drift-only features like imports and Dart templates will report errors, but the rest of the syntax works well. See this comment on how to set this up.

If you're looking for support for an other IDE that uses the Dart analysis server, please create an issue. We can probably make that happen.