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How to create an Android Studio plugin with the ADB connection and reading messages from the Logcat.
More than two years ago, I faced the issue that to debug requests from the Android device or emulator, you should use some third-party tools, and none of them was built inside the Android Studio. Then I saw that many people use the OkHttp Interceptor (I use OkHttp or Retrofit libraries in Android development), which just prints HTTP requests as plain text to the console.
But wait, why can’t we just parse this uncomfortable pure text format to the tree? Why should we search in tons of lines to get our request?
Finally, I decided to create an Android Studio plugin to parse that console output to some human-friendly format with the list of requests, the JSON trees, the human-readable headers, etc.
So this was an idea of the OkHttpProfiler plugin, and now I am going to tell you how to create something similar.
Step 1. Use the IntelliJ IDEA.
To develop for the Android Studio, you should use IntelliJ IDEA (Comunity Edition will fit your needs). There are two main ways to create a project: XML based and Gradle. I had some experience with the first option, so I definitely can advise you to use the Gradle.
Let’s create it: choose File->New Project->Gradle, and only then we should select the options below (Java, Kotlin, IntelliJ Platform Plugin) and proceed.
Now we have the project with the initial configuration for the plugin development, but we should set up it more.
Before Android Studio version 4.1, it was enough to use IntelliJ IDEA files for plugins development with ddmlib library usage. Unfortunately, after 4.1, Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA has some different realization of the same classes, so we MUST include libraries from the Android Studio if we are creating it for AS, and vice versa (see this thread).
