Automate Intellij via an external process

I'd like to control intellij remotely - in particular generate a run configuration programmatically.  I'd probably like to trigger some other actions as well.  Is there an automation API?  e.g. a package I can import that can connect to a running instance of Intellij?

My particular use-case would be:

* I have a JVM process running inside a docker container.
* I have a CLI tool that can programmatically get the (bridged) port of the JVM process

And...

* I then want the CLI to tell Intellij to create a new "Remote JVM Debug" configuration with the port number that I already know.