Docker container to run IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition (https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/)

Usage

docker run --rm \
  -e DISPLAY=${DISPLAY} \
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
  -v ~/.Idea:/home/developer/.Idea \
  -v ~/.Idea.java:/home/developer/.java \
  -v ~/.Idea.maven:/home/developer/.m2 \
  -v ~/.Idea.gradle:/home/developer/.gradle \
  -v ~/.Idea.share:/home/developer/.local/share/JetBrains \
  -v ~/Project:/home/developer/Project \
  --name idea-$(head -c 4 /dev/urandom | xxd -p)-$(date +'%Y%m%d-%H%M%S') \
rycus86/intellij-idea:${IDE_VERSION}

Docker Hub Page: https://hub.docker.com/r/rycus86/intellij-idea/ (available versions)

OS X instructions

1. Install XQuartz from https://www.xquartz.org/releases/
2. Configure Allow connections from network clients in the settings
   • Restart the system (needed only once when this is enabled)
3. Run xhost +localhost in a terminal to allow connecting to X11 over the TCP socket
4. Use -e DISPLAY=host.docker.internal:0 for passing the ${DISPLAY} environment

For Windows hosts (simplified):

docker.exe run --rm -d ^
     --name intellij-idea ^
     -e DISPLAY=YOUR_IP_ADDRESS:0.0 ^
     -v %TEMP%\.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix ^
     -v %USERPROFILE%\intellij-idea:/home/developer ^
     rycus86/intellij-idea:%IDE_VERSION%

Notes

The IDE will have access to a JDK and to Git as well. Project folders need to be mounted like -v ~/Project:/home/developer/Project. The actual name can be anything - I used something random to be able to start multiple instances if needed. You might want to consider using --network=host if you're running servers from the IDE.

UI Exception

Some Linux users may face java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError being thrown while running a container. Well, actually, it is rather simple to solve this issue. See, when you are running a graphical application on any Linux distro, it most definitely will try to create a connection to the X server. But in some cases there will be a security extension called Xsecurity and it will try to prevent such behavior by default.

To allow your containers to connect to the X server you'll need to use another X utility called xhost. But first you want to install it if you don't have one. Find a package name with this utility on your distro's repositories (e.g.: on Arch-based distros it will be in xorg-xhost package). Then use it to allow all local connections:

xhost +localhost

Idea Access Denied Exception

Container runs with developer user by default, so if you don't have your mapped volumes directories created, Docker will create them with a root user and Idea will not have access to them.

To solve this you should create volume directories by yourself with your default user or just chown them after they were created and rerun the container.