Setting Up IntelliJ IDEA on Fedora

JetBrains does not provide rpm's for IDEA, so setting it up on Fedora requires a bit of extra work. Here are the steps that I do.

Unzip the Distribution

# cd /opt
# tar -xzvf /path/to/ideaIC-10.5.tar.gz

This will create the directory /opt/idea-IC-107.105.

Create Symbolic Links

# cd /opt
# ln -sf /opt/idea-IC-107.105 /opt/idea
# ln -s /opt/idea/bin/idea.sh /usr/local/bin/idea

I overwrite the /opt/idea symlink each time I install a new version of IDEA. Creating the /usr/local/bin/idea symlink effectively adds idea to the system PATH. You'll only need to create this one the very first time you install IDEA.

Set JDK Environment Variable

idea.sh checks the IDEA_JDK, JDK_HOME and JAVA_HOME environment variables, in that order of preference, to determine the JVM it will use to run IDEA. Make sure one of these points to a JDK 6 installation. I am currently using JRockit, but the Sun JDK or OpenJDK will also work.

Update idea.vmoptions

The projects I work on are usually quite large, and my box is pretty beefy, so I always pump up the JVM's heap size and permgen size.

# cd /opt/idea/bin
# mv idea.vmoptions idea.vmoptions.orig
# cp /path/to/my/idea.vmoptions .

For reference, here's my idea.vmoptions file, though you will probably not want to use it verbatim:

-Xms1500M
-Xmx3000M
-XX:MaxPermSize=500M

Create a GNOME .desktop File

This will add an application launcher to the GNOME Applications menu. As root, create a file named idea.desktop in /usr/share/applications with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Name=IntelliJ IDEA
GenericName=Java IDE
Comment=IntelliJ IDEA is a code-centric IDE focused on developer productivity. The editor deeply understands your code and knows its way around the codebase, makes great suggestions right when you need them, and is always ready to help you shape your code.
Exec=idea
Icon=/opt/idea/bin/idea_CE128.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Development;IDE

If you wish to tweak this file at all, the syntax for .desktop files can be found here.