Installing and Configuring IntelliJ IDEA

With IntelliJ IDEA, you have two choices: use the commercial Ultimate Edition or the free Community Edition. In the following, we cover the installation and configuration of them both.

Installing the IntelliJ IDEA toolchain

The Ultimate Edition

The Ultimate Edition includes built-in support for creating Vaadin applications and running or debugging them in an integrated application server.

Community Edition

You can create a Vaadin application most easily with a Maven archetype and deploy it to a server using a Maven run/debug configuration.

You can get the both editions from the website at jetbrains.com/idea.

Installing the Ultimate Edition

Follow the installation instructions given at the website.

Configuring an Application Server

To run a Vaadin application during development in the Ultimate Edition of IntelliJ IDEA, you first need to install and configure an application server that is integrated with the IDE. The edition includes integration with many commonly used application servers.

In the following, we configure Apache Tomcat:

1. Download and extract Tomcat installation package to a local directory, as instructed in “Installing Apache Tomcat”.

2. Select Configure › Settings.

3. Select IDE Settings › Application Servers.

4. Click + and select Tomcat Server to add a Tomcat server, or any of the other supported servers. A WebSocket-enabled server, such as Glassfish or TomEE, is required for server push.

5. In the Tomcat Server dialog, specify the home directory for the server.

   

   Click OK.

6. Review the application server settings page to check that it is OK.

   

   Then, click OK.