Bazel for IntelliJ and WSL agency - not working in activated environments

Hello everyone,

This is not my personal issue, but I'm solving it on behalf of team members that are struggling with getting this to work. I've found out that the easy fix to this is just using IntelliJ IDEA for Linux from within WSL, but due to organizational restrictions, we can't go this route just yet.

So our users are using IntelliJ IDEA for Windows for now. We are perfectly aware that it can integrate with WSL: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/how-to-use-wsl-development-environment-in-product.html

The project that we're building uses a shell script that you need to invoke via `source` - this means that it's a shell script that runs within the same process as your interactive shell - the script is not a child process. It's important, because this script activates the development environment, much like Python's virtualenv. It installs programs, makes sure that the package managers are authenticated with protected repositories, and that the environment variables are set up such, that all these new tools are readily available.

We do it like this because we do not want to introduce any changes to the system's package manager, so that the WSL instance can work between different teams, should the team member decide to leave for another team, or work for multiple teams part time.

One complaint we get is that our setup makes it impossible to work with this plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8609-bazel-for-intellij

Like I said in the beginning of my post - this plugin works fine on WSL. It works fine because the process of IntelliJ IDEA was started as a child process of the interactive shell that activated the development environment.

Is there any way to bridge this gap on Windows?

Best regards,

grepwood