How to open IntelliJ (idea) from the command line on OSX

Posted by Brian Porter on June 10, 2020

I have been using IntelliJ for years, and have seem dozens of live coding sessions at conferences, or online tutorials which start a project with idea pom.xml, but never tried it myself.

idea pom.xml

So today, after trying without avail to start a downloaded repo with IntelliJ this way I finally looked into it.

It turns out all you have to do is have IntelliJ install a command line launcher by going to the following menu in IntelliJ:

Tools->Create Command-Line Launcher...

That it, now you can try thing like:

  • idea . to open the project in the current directory
  • idea pom.xml to import the Maven project

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