How to import and run existing plugins from intellij community edition repo

I was able to solve this by manually reordering file directories, sorting out dependencies and editing the .iml file. The type of plugin is defined by changing type="JAVA_MODULE" to type="PLUGIN_MODULE".

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This is the answer given by Dmitry Jemerov on the official Jetbrains plugin development forum:

The easiest answer to this is "don't". The IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition project is set up to be developed as a whole, and the dependencies are set up accordingly. If you want to hack on the Git plugin, you simply run IDEA using the provided run configuration, it runs with all plugins enabled, and you simply make whatever changes you need and test them using the main run configuration.

If you really want, you can set up a new plugin module and point it to the source code of the git4idea plugin inside the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition Git checkout. This is not too hard, but it's something you'll need to do from scratch, and you can't use the existing .iml file.

I had the same no plugin module specified for configuration issue. To work around it, instead of importing, I created a new plugin project and used the existing code directory.