Tools

Active contributors: Yahor Berdnikau, Andrey Yastrebov, Timofey Solonin

The tools/ lens groups the build-system integrations and adjacent helpers — the surfaces that let other projects use Kotlin. Most of these live under libraries/tools/, with one piece (JPS) at the repo root in jps/.

Pages in this section

• Kotlin Gradle Plugin (KGP) — libraries/tools/kotlin-gradle-plugin*/
• Maven plugin — libraries/kotlin-maven-plugin/ and friends
• JPS integration — jps/ and compiler/incremental-compilation-impl/
• See also: Build Tools API and Daemon under Compiler

Tool family

Tool	Where	What it does
Kotlin Gradle Plugin	libraries/tools/kotlin-gradle-plugin/	The Gradle integration — kotlin("jvm"), kotlin("multiplatform"), etc.
KGP API	libraries/tools/kotlin-gradle-plugin-api/	Stable Gradle DSL surface
KGP IDE	libraries/tools/kotlin-gradle-plugin-idea/	IDE-import support for KGP
Maven plugin	libraries/kotlin-maven-plugin/	The kotlin-maven-plugin Mojo
JPS plugin	jps/	IntelliJ build-system integration
Build Tools API	compiler/build-tools/kotlin-build-tools-api/	Stable in-process compiler API
Compile daemon	compiler/daemon/	Long-running JVM hosting the compiler
Build statistics	compiler/build-tools/kotlin-build-statistics/	Compilation metrics
ABI validator	libraries/tools/abi-validation/	Verify klib ABI stability
Binary compatibility validator	libraries/tools/binary-compatibility-validator/	Verify JVM API stability
dukat	libraries/tools/dukat/	TypeScript declaration → Kotlin (maintenance mode)
kotlin-main-kts	libraries/tools/kotlin-main-kts/	CLI-friendly script runner
kotlin-stdlib-gen	libraries/tools/kotlin-stdlib-gen/	Code generator for stdlib templates
kotlin-stdlib-docs	libraries/tools/kotlin-stdlib-docs/	Doc-site builder
kotlinp	libraries/tools/kotlinp/	CLI to inspect Kotlin metadata in .class / .knm
Stats analyser	libraries/tools/stats-analyser/	Build statistics analyzer
ide-plugin-dependencies-validator	libraries/tools/ide-plugin-dependencies-validator/	Sanity checks for IDE plugin deps
jdk-api-validator	libraries/tools/jdk-api-validator/	Detect JDK API usage outside the supported baseline
Kotlin tooling-core, tooling-metadata	libraries/tools/kotlin-tooling-{core,metadata}/	Shared types used by KGP and other tools

How they interact

graph LR
    User["User project"] -->|kotlin("jvm")| KGP["Kotlin Gradle Plugin"]
    User -->|<plugin>...kotlin-maven-plugin| Maven["Maven plugin"]
    IDEA["IntelliJ IDEA"] -->|JPS| JPS["jps/"]
    KGP --> BTAPI["Build Tools API"]
    Maven --> BTAPI
    JPS --> Inc["incremental-compilation-impl"]
    BTAPI --> Daemon["Compile daemon"]
    BTAPI -->|in-process| Compiler["Kotlin compiler"]
    Daemon --> Compiler
    Inc --> Compiler

Where to start

For Gradle work: libraries/tools/kotlin-gradle-plugin/AGENTS.md and the KGP page. For Maven work: libraries/kotlin-maven-plugin/. For IDE-import behavior: libraries/tools/kotlin-gradle-plugin-idea/.