All IntelliJ run configurations disappeared

Question

After IntelliJ IDEA froze and was killed from the task manager, all the Run/Debug Configurations disappeared. I have tried invalidating caches, reloading files from disk, synchronizing and restarting, but nothing helped.

Answer 1

You can try to restore your Run configuration using the Local History feature of IntelliJ IDEA.

If you are using .idea directory based format, then your configurations will reside in workspace.xml file under .idea directory, invoke Local History dialog from the .idea directory right click menu in IDEA Project View, select the label some time before the crash and revert the old copy of workspace.xml.

In case .ipr file based format is used, your configurations will be stored in the <project>.iws file in the project root which you can restore in a similar way.

If the configurations were Shared, they are stored in .idea\runConfigurations directory as separate XML files or in the <project>.ipr file (if old project format is used).

If the Local history is blank and you are in Windows, try Restore previous versions right clicking the workspace.xml file or the <project>.iws one in Windows Explorer.

Answer 2

You can go to your main project and right click on it, select local history --> show history. Find some point in time where you think that system was stable (before crash) and click revert. This worked for me.

Answer 3

To me, this frequently happened on switching branches. Turning off "restore workspace on branch switching" helps to prevent the run configurations from getting lost.

Answer 4

For every project in intellij there's a file created with all the configurations related to it. Under the root directory of the project there's a hidden folder .idea in it is the workspace.xml with the configuration. workspace.xml is comprised of components one of which is responsible to hold the run/debug configurations.

If this file is getting corrupted it's difficult to restore these configurations if you don't have a backup of workspace.xml. to overcome it: 1. in intellij right click the workspace.xml file under project view and choose Local History -> Show History 2. if there's no history you can copy the component from a coworker with similar configurations. 3. backup in advance the workspace.xml and retrieve the RunManager component from it..

another good choice is to use the share option. under each project's definition there's a checkbox share

Marking this checkbox will extract the definition for this project to an external location: under the same .idea folder a new folder is being created runConfigurations and the configurations per project are being represented there in xml files.

The advantage of using share is that it can be copied and used for similar projects under other branched like QA and production