IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1 Help

Sharing Your IDE Settings

IntelliJ IDEA allows you to share your IDE settings between different instances of IntelliJ IDEA (or other IntelliJ platform-based) products installed on different computers.

This is useful if you are using several IntelliJ IDEA installations, or want to implement the same settings among your team members or company-wide.

To use this feature, you need to make sure that the bundled Settings Repository plugin is enabled.

Configuring Settings Repository

If you want to share your IDE settings, perform the following steps:

  1. Create a repository on GitHub.
  2. On the computer where the IntelliJ IDEA instance whose settings you want to share is installed, navigate to File | Settings Repository. Specify the URL of the repository you've created and click Overwrite Remote.
  3. On each computer where you want your settings to be applied, navigate to File | Settings Repository, specify the URL of the repository you've created, and click Overwrite Local.

    You can click Merge if you want the repository to keep a combination of the remote settings and your local settings. If any conflicts are detected, a dialog will be displayed where you can resolve these conflicts.

    If you want to overwrite the remote settings with your local settings, click Overwrite Remote.

Your local settings will be automatically synchronized with the settings stored in the repository each time you perform an Update Project or a Push operation, or when you close your project or exist IntelliJ IDEA.

If you want to disable automatic settings synchronization, navigate to File | Settings | Settings Repository and disable the Auto Sync option. You will be able to update your settings manually by choosing VCS | Sync Settings from the main menu.

Authentication

On the first sync, you will be prompted to specify a username and password.

It is recommended to use an access token for GitHub authentication. If, for some reason, you want to use a username and password instead of an access token, or your Git hosting provider doesn't support it, it is recommended to configure the Git credentials helper.

Note that the OS X Keychain is supported, which means you can share your credentials between all IntelliJ Platform-based products (you will be prompted to grant access if the original IDE is different from the requestor IDE).

Configuring a read-only source

Apart from the Settings Repository, you can configure any number of additional repositories containing any types of settings you want to share, including live templates, file templates, schemes, deployment options, etc.

These repositories are referred to as Read-only sources, as they cannot be overwritten or merged, just used as a source of settings as is.

To configure such repositories, do the following:

  1. Navigate to File | Settings | Repository Settings.
  2. Click the add_icon icon and add the URL of the GitHub repository that contains the settings you want to share.

Synchronization with the settings from read-only sources is performed in the same way as for the Settings Repository.

See Also

Last modified: 13 July 2016