Best Way to Share IntelliJ IDEA Settings (Code Style, Actions on Save, Maven, etc.) Across Many Projects
Hello!
My team works with IntelliJ IDEA and we manage a large number of projects (integration work, so lots of repositories). We're trying to find the best way to share and standardize IDE settings across all projects and all team members.
So far, I’ve found the following:
- We can configure "Settings for New Projects" to define common settings like code style, actions on save, Maven options, etc.
🔹 This works well, but only affects new or newly cloned projects.
🔸 For existing projects, the settings don’t apply retroactively, and we’d have to delete and re-clone them to get the defaults. - We can use
.editorconfigfor basic code style, which is version-controlled and recognized by IntelliJ, but it doesn’t cover everything (like Actions on Save or Maven settings). - Some settings (like code styles and inspections) can be stored in
.idea/and versioned, but other settings (like Actions on Save) are stored inworkspace.xml, which is user-specific and not shareable.
Please note,
- We don’t use IntelliJ's cloud sync or any other cloud solutions
- We don’t want to rely on external plugins (e.g. Shared Settings plugins).
My Question:
What’s the best practice for sharing and enforcing IntelliJ IDEA settings (beyond just code style) across many existing and future projects, without having to re-clone everything?
Would love to hear how other teams handle this — especially for settings like:
- Actions on Save (reformat, optimize imports)
- Maven or Gradle settings
- Inspections
- Encoding
Also, is there a clean way to retrofit existing projects with updated settings?
Thanks!
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Hello, there!
Thank you for reaching out to us, and thank you also for sharing the context of your team and company. I apologize for the delay in our response. I was getting the most accurate info to let you know. Also, super nice that you're engaging the team in sharing a default configuration around all projects and team members.
Now, allow me to go straight to your question:
To be honest with you, this is a highly requested feature, with which we face some pain points when evaluating its viability. This has been reported multiple times before, and you can check all the details here: IJPL-8661 and IJPL-8522.
The answer is that there is no easy way to standardize global settings across all projects and team members, when it comes to existing projects. I understand you mentioned you don't want to rely on external plugins, but I would like to bring (in case it raises your curiosity) that, since you don't use the cloud sync, there is a potential way (although it is deprecated) to do it via sharing the settings through a Shared Repository. However, this is only possible when utilizing the Settings Repository plugin.
On the other hand, we offer a solution for large teams, which is to utilize our IDE Provisioner. Feel free to use the free trial and check how this applies to you and the team.
I hope this helps you along the way, but please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any other questions.