Experimental IDE

This page is outdated, and the drift analysis plugin is not currently available. It may be re-enabled in a future drift version.

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

Tell Dart Code to analyze drift files. Add this to your settings.json:
```
"dart.additionalAnalyzerFileExtensions": ["drift"]
```
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.