IntelliJ - the Community Edition rescued the broken Ultimate Edition . . . ;)

It sound funny to say that - IntelliJ Community Edition (free edition) rescued Ultimate Edition (paid edition). But that's what really put me back on Ultimate Edition after many months of switching to Community Edition for my day-to-day development.

Environment: IntelliJ Community Edition 2023.2.1, IntelliJ Ultimate Edition 2023.2.1, maven 3.9.3 on macOS Catalina 10.15.7

The Issue

I stopped using IntelliJ Ultimate Edition as for some weird reason it got stuck with maven dependencies broken paths issue. Specifically, SLF4J and javax libraries were shown in maven dependency broken paths in red. It happened few months ago. One day one of my maven projects that uses Lombok and had classes annotated with @Slf4J suddenly couldn't recognize the log (logger object) statements. When I checked project module dependencies there were broken maven dependency paths.

I tried all recommended and possible ways to recover from this issue like: Invalidate Caches and restart the IDE(A), blowing away specific libraries maven cache ~/.m2/libraries/.../*.* and letting it build again, blowing away entire maven local cache ~/.m2/*.* and letting it build again, downloading dependency jars and explicitly setting dependency paths in the project/module settings, reinstalling the Ultimate Edition, even reinstalling different version of the Ultimate Edition etc. Nothing worked. I spent lot of time few times since then and couldn't get it back to working. Finally gave up and moved to Community Edition. Same projects that were having broken dependency issues in Ultimate Edition, when opened in Community edition, had no issues with those dependencies, same maven local cache paths are used by both. The Ultimate Edition complains, the Community Edition doesn't. Alas!

The Fix

Here is what I did to fix it.

Started IntelliJ Ultimate Edition. At the startup there is a Customize link, click that and click Import Settings... link as shown below:

Selected the Community Edition settings directory (~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/IdeaIC2023.2) of Community Edition in which my projects were fine with dependencies. It prompted to take a backup of current settings. I did that and imported ommunity Edition settings. It opened projects and the issue of broken dependency paths was gone.

It seemed like, there was some broken dependency path setting saved in the Ultimate Edition settings that was stuck and not getting fixed by any means.

Some Internals

IntelliJ saves all it's settings under the specific version's area. On Mac, by default, this area is under ~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains dir. The community edition directories start with IdeaIC<version> (e.g IdeaIC2023.2) and ultimate edition directories start with IntelliJIdea<version> (e.g. IntelliJIdea2023.2). The options sub-directory is where plugins settings get saved. 

Plugin Settings

Plugin settings are pat of IntelliJ settings and get stored in xml files under options sub-directory of specific IntelliJ version's settings directory. For instance, awesome editor plugin is a simple and pretty neat plugin which lets add image backgrounds. I did setup plugin awesome editor to display different kinds of images for different types of files. To get all the settings from one IntelliJ version to another, just copy the plugin settings file (in this case it is: awesome-editor-3.xml). 

Here is an example to copy plugin settings set in Ultimate edition to Community Edition.

NOTE: Once copied restart IntelliJ Community Edition.

$ cd ~/Library/"Application Support"/JetBrains $ ls -al |grep IdeaIC drwxr-xr-x 17 pottepalemg 163264107 544 Jul 26 2022 IdeaIC2022.1 drwxr-xr-x 20 pottepalemg 163264107 640 Nov 30 2022 IdeaIC2022.2 drwxr-xr-x 20 pottepalemg 163264107 640 Mar 30 15:23 IdeaIC2022.3 drwxr-xr-x 20 pottepalemg 163264107 640 Jul 7 11:31 IdeaIC2023.1 drwxr-xr-x 20 pottepalemg 163264107 640 Aug 28 10:13 IdeaIC2023.2 $ ls -al |grep IntelliJIdea drwxr-xr-x 22 pottepalemg 163264107 704 Aug 24 15:43 IntelliJIdea2020.1 drwxr-xr-x 19 pottepalemg 163264107 608 Nov 19 2020 IntelliJIdea2020.2 drwxr-xr-x 21 pottepalemg 163264107 672 Mar 2 2022 IntelliJIdea2020.3 drwxr-xr-x 20 pottepalemg 163264107 640 Jul 9 2021 IntelliJIdea2021.1 drwxr-xr-x 24 pottepalemg 163264107 768 Feb 9 2022 IntelliJIdea2021.2 drwxr-xr-x 25 pottepalemg 163264107 800 Apr 12 2022 IntelliJIdea2021.3 drwxr-xr-x 26 pottepalemg 163264107 832 Sep 23 2022 IntelliJIdea2022.1 drwxr-xr-x 25 pottepalemg 163264107 800 Nov 30 2022 IntelliJIdea2022.2 drwxr-xr-x 25 pottepalemg 163264107 800 Jun 28 13:26 IntelliJIdea2022.3 drwxr-xr-x 24 pottepalemg 163264107 768 Aug 16 15:40 IntelliJIdea2023.1 drwxr-xr-x 22 pottepalemg 163264107 704 Aug 28 10:36 IntelliJIdea2023.2 drwxr-xr-x 11 pottepalemg 163264107 352 Aug 25 15:35 IntelliJIdea2023.2-backup $ find . -name awesome* ./IntelliJIdea2023.2/options/awesome-editor-3.xml $ ls -ltr ./IdeaIC2023.2/options | grep awesome* $ cp ./IntelliJIdea2023.2/options/awesome-editor-3.xml ./IdeaIC2023.2/options

TIPS

Getting back lost database connection settings into Ultimate Edition

IntelliJ Ultimate Edition comes bundled with Database plugin that supports all features that are available in DataGrip (an SQL IDE which is a product of JetBrains). I had database connections set to connect to various PostgreSQL databases (local, int, cert, prod etc.) which I lost by importing Community Edition settings. But I had a settings backup prompted and done for the Ultimate Edition settings that my broken Ultimate Edition was setup with when I imported Community Edition Settings. The backup directory is also listed in the above list of Ultimate Editions setting directories. To get those settings back onto my new settings imported from Community Edition, I had to repeat the Customize > Import Settings... step two more times. First time pointing it to the backup directory and selecting and copying all database connections settings to the clipboard. Second time pointing it to the Community Edition Directory and pasting those connection settings from the clipboard. This was the only way I could get those database connections copied. I got all connection settings except passwords fro every connection. I had to set password for every single connection individually. This was not possible by simply copying xml files like I did for awesome editor plugin.

Summary

No software application or tool is bug-free. Applications do crash, tools do get corrupted. There is no one solution that works or fixes a similar issue for everybody. Some stupid, nasty, unknown, not very well documented internals of tools do take up lot of time to discover a fix that works for your situation and may help some others who get into similar situation.

Hope this blog post on my discovery saves someone's time sometime when that someone bumps into it.