Start two instances of IntelliJ IDE

Question

Well my question is pretty simple, how do I start two instances of IntelliJ (community edition). When I have one instance started and I try to start another one, all that ha

Answer 1

CrazyCoder has roughly the right idea. However, setting the config file alone was not sufficient for me to run multiple instances. Here are my steps to get this going (in GNU/Linux, I am sure you can figure out equivalent in other systems):

1. Create a folder/directory per instance you want to run.

   mkdir -p ~/idea/instance-0
   

2. Go to the installation directory (e.g. /opt/intellij) and copy the idea.properties (in bin) file over to your instance directory.

   cp /opt/intellij/bin/idea.properties ~/idea/instance-0/
   

3. Copy 3 more directories: system, plugins, and config. I highly recommend doing this without the running instance

   cp -r /opt/intellij/system ~/idea/instance-0/
   cp -r /opt/intellij/plugins ~/idea/instance-0/
   cp -r /opt/intellij/config ~/idea/instance-0/
   mkdir ~/idea/instance-0/log
   

4. Open your idea.properties file and update the configurations for your directories:

   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   # Uncomment this option if you want to customize path to IDE config folder. Make sure you're using forward slashes.
   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   idea.config.path=${user.home}/config
   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   # Uncomment this option if you want to customize path to IDE system folder. Make sure you're using forward slashes.
   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   idea.system.path=${user.home}/system
   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   # Uncomment this option if you want to customize path to user installed plugins folder. Make sure you're using forward slashes.
   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   idea.plugins.path=${user.home}/plugins
   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   # Uncomment this option if you want to customize path to IDE logs folder. Make sure you're using forward slashes.
   #---------------------------------------------------------------------
   idea.log.path=${user.home}/log
   

5. Now, you can start IntelliJ with the new setup:

   IDEA_PROPERTIES=~/idea/instance-0/idea.properties /opt/intellij/bin/idea
   

Obviously, you probably want to put the command in a script file for invocation. This seems to work for me.