I closed the HotRulez announcement in June by telling people to grab a ZIP from a GitHub release, because the plugin was not on the JetBrains Marketplace yet. The listing went live the same day, which made that paragraph wrong almost immediately. It is fixed now, and the reason I am writing this at all is the number on the listing: HotRulez has passed a thousand downloads. The counter read 1,057 when I checked while writing this, on 2026-09-06.
I am proud of that, and more than of the count itself, of what it implies. People went looking for this, and until HotRulez there was nothing free to find.
What HotRulez does, briefly
It gives .rules files a real language in JetBrains IDEs, Android Studio included: syntax highlighting, one-keystroke reformatting, structural diagnostics, and symbol intelligence that resolves your helper functions, parameters, let bindings, and path variables with Firebase’s actual scoping. Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage both work, with the dialect detected from the service declaration in each file. It is purely structural. It never connects to Firebase, never runs the emulator, and never decides whether a rule authorizes a request. The release post has the full tour, and the source is MIT-licensed on GitHub.
Installing it is one search now
The listing is Firebase Rules (HotRulez), plugin id dev.lezli.hotrulez, free, MIT. Open Settings, then Plugins, then the Marketplace tab, search for it, install, restart. That is the whole thing. No release page, no ZIP, no “Install Plugin from Disk”.
The listing declares since-build 252.0 with no upper bound, so it runs on the 2025.2 line and everything after it. The ZIP and the build-from-source paths still exist and are still documented in the repo, which is what you want if you need to pin a specific version or install on a machine with no Marketplace access. For everyone else the disk-install instructions were friction I am glad to have removed.
What a thousand downloads says about the gap
Search the JetBrains Marketplace for Firebase rules and you will find plugins that do the job. Every one I looked at before starting was paid. I never got far enough into any of them to have an opinion on how good they are, because the price tag was the end of the evaluation for me: I was not going to pay a subscription to syntax-highlight a config file. That is the entire origin story of HotRulez. I wanted the tooling, I wanted it free, so I wrote it.
A thousand downloads in about two months is not a big number in absolute terms. It is a clear one. It says that a meaningful slice of the people who need highlighting and go-to-definition on a security-critical config file were not going to pay a subscription for it, and were waiting for another option.
Here is the honest half. A download counts a download, not a person: in-IDE updates pull the file again, so the total mixes fresh installs with everyone who upgraded through the 0.7 and 0.8 releases. I have no retention data and no idea how many of those installs are still enabled. What I can say is that the counter kept climbing after the initial announcement traffic died down, which is the part I actually care about.
What has shipped since June
The plugin has not been sitting still since the announcement. Version 0.7.0 added the authoring layer: a structure view outlining services, matches, functions, and allow rules, code folding for those blocks, quick documentation on Ctrl+Q with doc-grounded descriptions and an external Firebase link, parameter info on Ctrl+P, and quick-fixes attached to the symbol inspections. Version 0.8.0 added the unknown-member inspection, a conservative weak warning when a member access on a closed built-in like request or resource names something that dialect does not define, with did-you-mean rename fixes. It deliberately never flags your own data, custom auth claims, or object metadata, because those are open shapes and the plugin infers no types. Version 0.8.1 dropped some deprecated ParameterInfoHandler overrides that the JetBrains plugin verifier flagged.
That is where it stands: 0.8.1, published on 2026-07-06, and the limitations I named at release are all still true. No type inference, no Realtime Database, one fixed formatting style, and no opinion whatsoever on whether your rules are secure. I have no roadmap to announce. The next version will be driven by how Firestore rules themselves evolve and by what people report back in issues and discussions, which is a more useful queue than anything I would invent on my own.
The accounting is simple. I am not charging for HotRulez, and in return it is running in more than a thousand IDEs two months after the first Marketplace build, which is a trade I would make again without thinking about it. The project page lives at lezli01.is-a.dev/projects/hotrulez, and everything else I build is collected at lezli01.is-a.dev.