Where is IntelliJ IDEA config stored in OSX?

Question

As part of a corporate workstation compliance effort, our IT department had to create a new user account for me on my Mac and left the old account until I transition all the artifacts and configs. So my old home directory was /Users/firstlast and the new one is /Users/flast. Of course, the burden of reconfiguring my environment fell on me.

Some of the apps that I use, such as ssh, Maven, Dropbox and DBeaver have their config conveniently and cleanly stored in the home directory (.ssh, .m2, .dropbox, .dbeaver, respectively) so migrating those was a cakewalk just copying the directory from the old home to the new using sudo and then chown. However, that is not the case with IntelliJ IDEA.

My IDEA was heavily customized to the extent that I would like to avoid doing it all over again if by all means possible. I understand that each project has its own config in the project directory but what I am after is to get the same list of projects to open when I launch IDEA under the new user as I did under the old user. All my projects were in ~/DEV (so ~/DEV/project1, ~/DEV/project2, etc and I can just copy the DEV directory from the old home to the new.

Where is this list of projects stored? I imagine it is somewhere in /private/etc or /private/var but permissioned to the old user so the new user does not see it.

Answer 1

This Jetbrains documentation lists where the important directories are:

http://devnet.jetbrains.com/docs/DOC-181

On Mac OS X IDEA uses the following directories:
Config: ~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIdeaXX
System: ~/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdeaXX
Plugins: ~/Library/Application Support/IntelliJIdeaXX
Logs: ~/Library/Logs/IntelliJIdeaXX (starting from IntelliJ IDEA 9.0, older versions keep logs under System location)

Answer 2

While each project has its own config contained within the project directory, what you really want is when you first launch IDEA to get the same list of projects to choose from as before and just copying project directories will not do that.

Here are three easy steps to do it:

1. If your projects were in located in your old home directory, copy them into the new home directory and chown them to the new user. If they were located outside your old home directory, all you will need to do is chown them to the new user.

2. sudo cp -r /Users/${OLD_USER}/Library/Preferences/IdeaIC13 /Users/${NEW_USER}/Library/Preferences

3. sudo chown -R ${NEW_USER} /Users/${NEW_USER}/Library/Preferences/IdeaIC13

Ta-da-da. Open your IDE and it looks identical as before.