TechBrew

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How to put IntelliJ IDEA on Ubuntu

November 28th, 2007 by Mark Woodman

IntelliJ IDEAI’ve been a user of the excellent IntelliJ Java IDE for 4 years on Windows. Even though the official Linux support by JetBrains is only for RedHat, you can also install IntelliJ fairly easily on Ubuntu. I’ve tested this with Xubunto 7.10 (Gutsy), Java 6, and IntelliJ 7. Here’s how to do it in four basic steps:

1) Get Java

Install the Java 6 JDK, which IDEA itself needs to run. (You can have other JDKs for your projects, but you’ll need this one to run IntelliJ itself.) For example, type this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Follow the prompts for root password, download confirmation, and eventually the Sun EULA to install Java itself. If it installed successfully, you should be able to type this at a prompt:

java -version

… to get several lines telling you the version of Java you have installed. If this doesn’t work, refer to Sun’s documentation on troubleshooting installations.

2) Get IntelliJ IDEA

Download the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA for Linux:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/index.html#linux

Once the download is finished, extract the archive using the correct filename according to your download. For example, to install IntelliJ in /usr/lib, do the following:

tar xfz idea-7.0.1.tar.gz ./usr/lib/

The IntelliJ installation will now be in a subdirectory indicating the build number, in the format “idea-xxxx”. In the case of IDEA 7.0.1, the app directory is “idea-7364“. (Once the extraction is done, you can delete the downloaded archive to conserve disk space if needed.)

3) Get Environmental

There are a couple of environment variables to be taken care of. First, you need to set a new environment variable that tells IntelliJ where your install of Java is. For example:

export JDK_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/"

Use the “env” command, or just “echo $JDK_HOME“, to verify the variable is set.

Next, you’ll need to edit /etc/environment with superuser rights in the editor of your choice, adding the idea-xxxx/bin directory to your PATH variable. For example, you can edit the environment with the GUI mousepad editor like so:

sudo mousepad /etc/environment

The various directories in the environment PATH variable are delineated by colons (:). Append the current value (inside the quotes) with a new colon and then add the idea-xxxx/bin location. It should look something like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/lib/idea-7364/bin"

Save and close the environment file. You’ll need to “source” it for your system to pick up the new directory in the PATH. You can verify your changes by echoing the variable as well:

source /etc/environment
echo $PATH

If you see the path to IntelliJ returned in the output, you’re all set.

Lastly, you may want to change the VM settings of IntelliJ. This depends entirely on your project size and other factors, so you’ll need to base these settings on your own need. The settings are in idea-xxx/bin/idea.vmoptions.

4) Get Started!

That’s it. Now you can run “idea.sh” from a terminal in any directory, and IntelliJ should launch…

idea.sh

If you run into problems, be sure to double-check the readme files in the installation directory.

Give Back

If this article proved useful to you, please drop us a comment and let us know. Or, if you find problems/alternate solutions along the way, please share them for the benefit of others. Thanks and happy coding!

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13 responses so far ↓

  • 1 David robles // Dec 11, 2007 at 11:19 am

    Thank your for the post, it helped me a lot! But just one more question..
    I’m running Intellij from the terminal as you mentioned in the post, but if I close the terminal it closes Intellij as well, is there any way of keep it running without having the terminal window open??

  • 2 Mark Woodman // Dec 11, 2007 at 1:22 pm

    David,

    Add an ampersand (&) to the end of your command (”idea.sh &”) to run it as a background process.

    For more info on foreground/background processes in unix, here is a helpful page.

    - Mark

  • 3 David robles // Dec 11, 2007 at 2:19 pm

    Thanks, now it’s working the way I wanted.

    Thanks again.

  • 4 G // Jan 7, 2008 at 2:24 pm

    Thanks for the tutorial.
    I’m running Ubuntu 7.10, Java 6 and Idea 7.0.2 and Idea complained about a JAVA_HOME environment variable as well.

    So my addition to this tutorial would be to:
    Add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc
    export JDK_HOME=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/”
    export JAVA_HOME=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/”
    ~

    and then run
    source ~/.bashrc
    to apply those two variables.

    Worked for me at least.

  • 5 Michael Vogt // Jan 31, 2008 at 1:07 pm

    Hi.

    Worked perfectly. Thanks for this article.

    But, isn’t there any other way available to start intellij than from the terminal? (Yup, linux noop here).

    Thanks,
    Michael

  • 6 Mark Woodman // Feb 1, 2008 at 10:31 am

    You can create a desktop shortcut if you like. How to do it depends on your desktop environment.

    Here’s a forum thread that discusses a couple of ways:
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=360263

  • 7 Michael Vogt // Feb 2, 2008 at 3:01 am

    Hello Mark.

    Thanks for your answer. Seems the problem I had a comletely different problem. The export of $JDK_HOME was not persisted. I had to add the path to the environment file. Now all works as expected.

    Thanks,
    Michael

  • 8 albemuth // Feb 11, 2008 at 10:59 pm

    I followed David’s post but my jvm was in a different location, to find it I used

    find / | grep jvm

    then I set both variables to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/

  • 9 Jonathan Moore // Mar 19, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    You should set the path as

    export PATH=$PATH:new_stuff

    so you don’t remove othere things added

  • 10 Benito // Apr 10, 2008 at 5:26 am

    you could write a launch script and create a menu item pointing to it, e.g.

    launch.sh

    export JDK_HOME=[whatever]
    export JAVA_HOME=[whatever]
    /home/benito/idea702/bin/idea.sh

    make it exectable
    chmod +x launch.sh

    then just point the menu editor to it, it even has some icons for you to choose from in the bin directory.

  • 11 Phil W-S // Apr 23, 2008 at 6:52 am

    If you want a really lightweight “launcher” for your launch panel (or a menu) you can set one up with the following command set in it:

    /bin/sh -c “export JDK_HOME=[whatever] && /[idea install path]/bin/idea.sh”

  • 12 mauro // Jul 4, 2008 at 5:23 am

    Hi. Thanks for your post, I find it very usefull.
    I have a problem running idea.. I start it and everything seems to be ok but I can’t see the content of the main window!!
    I’m new on Linux, hope you could help me.
    thanks in advance.

    mauro

  • 13 mauro // Jul 4, 2008 at 6:06 am

    OK! I’ve get it.. It was the Nvidia drivers.
    Thanks! :)

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