You can't Import a Bazel Project when using IntelliJ IDEA Remote Development

JetBrains has announced a new “Remote Development” mode for IntelliJ IDEA. In this mode, you connect via SSH to a host running a headless copy of IntelliJ.

https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/ https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/remote-development-a.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/remote-development-overview.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/faq-about-remote-development.html

Under this mode of development, you can’t create a new IntelliJ project. The “remote development” connection dialog won’t allow you to submit it without specifying the location of an existing project.

As a result, in order to set up a Bazel project, I had to:

• VNC into my Ubuntu host
• Install a full copy of IntelliJ on the host
• “Import Bazel Project” on the host
• Back on the guest, connect remotely to the host and point to the generated .ijwb folder

That’s disappointing, especially since the best practice is not to check in the .ijwb folder, but only check in .bazelproject files and generate .ijwb from those.

At a minimum, https://ij.bazel.build/docs/bazel-plugin.html should be updated to document this painful workaround. Ideally, at some point, it should be possible to “Import Bazel Project” remotely, without VNCing into the host and doing it there.