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I've been using devcontainers in Node development in VSC and enjoy the idea that I can commit a shared configuration to ensure everyone on the team has the same runtime/buildtime. I've been looking for a similar way to configure IntelliJ, but am having some difficulties determining if this is even possible.

I am running IntelliJ 2020.2 and have the Node Remote Interpreter plugin installed.

In my devcontainer, I map a Docker volume node_modules to my workspace such that all my different containers can share the same volume, and not need to re-download the set of npm modules everytime.

I have setup & created an appropriate Run/Debug Docker configuration, and when I launch it, the container is built & configured properly. However, in IntelliJ, understandably, the node_modules folder still remains blank (as that folder is only mounted in the remote container).

Similarly, I have setup a remote Node run configuration pointing to my docker image, but similarly, IntelliJ does not see any libraries that are supposed to be in the node_modules folder.

Is there any way to work with this kind of configuration in IntelliJ such that the IDE understands the mappings I create in my Docker container?

Eric B.
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3 Answers3

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no, there is no such feature in IDEA. Please vote for IDEA-202267 to be notified on any progress with this feature request

lena
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    That is a big disappointment. I am disappointed to see that I cannot use IntelliJ to work on code without having complete local installations of all tooling required. – Eric B. Oct 13 '20 at 22:11
  • I noticed that there is also: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455 to vote and track – Eric B. Oct 13 '20 at 22:12
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Update 28th October 2022

JetBrains seems to integrate GitHub Codespaces as a full supported JetBrains Gateway Provider. So maybe there will be a direct support of the open sourced Dev Container spec soon.

Original answer

JetBrains now supports GitPod as a first class citizen implementation for the Development Containers concept. Both IntelliJ Idea and the next-gen IDE Fleet are supported. Also JetBrains Space would be an option, if you have licences for it in your company. There's a landing page that present all the options:

enter image description here

In contrast to the VSCode style implementation of the concept where you configure your Dev Containers using a devcontainer.json with GitPod you use a .gitpod.yml. But GitPod is already working actively on supporting the devcontainer.json format, which was Open Sourced by Microsoft here.

More details and in-depth review of the Development Containers concept can be found in this post.

jonashackt
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    There are some uses for that, but running the development environment in the cloud is not acceptable to many either due to concerns about network performance or because they want to keep the source code within their private network. – Jan Hudec Aug 17 '22 at 07:59
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    GitPod is a little bit different, Docker Desktop now allow to run local containers and work inside using Visual Studio Code https://docs.docker.com/desktop/dev-environments/ . But unfortunately JetBrains not support it. – Yevhen Tienkaiev Oct 14 '22 at 17:25
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Jetbrains released Dev Containers Plugin starting from June 2023

Byeonggon Lee
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