Kotlin, Typescript & Python monorepo all in IntelliJ IDEA?

Hi Matthew,

You can use the IDE Workspace feature that relies on the official Multi-Project Workspace plugin.

• A workspace acts as a generic container for your development environment, encompassing all necessary projects, code, and libraries. You can manually create a workspace and add existing projects to it, regardless of their build tools (e.g., Maven, Gradle) or programming languages.
• Workspaces can be defined through a jb-workspace.xml file within an .idea folder in a repository. This file lists the configurations and Git repository URLs of various projects, enabling IntelliJ IDEA to automatically check out all listed projects upon cloning the repository.
• Within a workspace, you can load and unload individual modules or projects as needed. This helps optimize resource usage by preventing the IDE from indexing files of projects that are not actively being worked on, without losing their references within the workspace.
• While a workspace organizes multiple projects, each project maintains its own independent settings (e.g., code style, SDK) stored in its respective .idea folder. When a project is added to a workspace, its settings are copied to the workspace folder, allowing for local modifications without affecting the original project settings. This enables a single project to be included in multiple workspaces with different configurations.

More information can be found in the official documentation: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/workspaces.html

OMG if only IDEA would autodetect that when I open the root of the mono repo via `idea .`.  I wasn’t aware of that plugin.  Is it bundled with IDEA?

It is not bundled, you need install and enable it manually.

Note: The plugin is not available in IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition.

I've installed the plugin and review its documentation.  As I read it, it seems as though there's still a fundamental assumption that the plugin, and all JetBrains products, make:  each IDE project must be in its own directory so that it can have its own `.idea` folder in the root folder of the project.  Please confirm if this is true or not.

As I mentioned in my original post, our monorepo's root directory contains our root gradle files `build.gradle.kts` & `settings.gradle.kts` for our kotlin projects, our `package.json` & `turbo.json` for our npm projects, and `pyproject.toml` & `uv.lock` for our uv-based python workspace.  The various projects exist below the root, scattered across the monorepo.

We typically organize our directory tree by libraries versus back-end applications versus user interfaces, then by technology.  For example, the repo has

• libs/jvm/my-kotlin-lib that houses a Kotlin library project,
• libs/web/my-vue-ui-lib that houses a Typescript Vue.js library project of reusable UI components,
• libs/python/my_python_lib that houses a Python library project,
• microservices/jvm/my-kotlin-ms that houses a Kotlin microservice that depends on my-kotlin-lib,
• uis/web/my-web-ui that houses a Vue.js SPA that depends on my-vue-ui-lib & the OpenAPI spec from my-kotlin-ms,
• uis/mobile/android/my-android-app that houses an Android Studio Kotlin project that depends on my-kotlin-lib, and
• microservices/python/my-python-model-ms that houses python-based ML/AI models that depend on my_python_lib.

Please advise as to how I'm supposed to create the Workspace project in this scenario, because I'm not sure that the Multi-Project Workspace will still not work in this repository as-is.  My only thought is to somehow create an IntelliJ IDEA project in each project within a `jvm` directory, a WebStorm project in each project within a `web` directory, and a PyCharm project in each project within a `python` directory, then create a Workspace project in the root, and add each project to the workspace.  If there's a better way, I'm all ears.

Thanks for your help so far.

⬆️  @..., any input here?  What I think would be perfect would be to move away from using the `.idea` directory-based IDE project files back to file-based `.ipr` files with different filenames for each product & project (like `all-idea.ipr`, `analytics-pycharm.ipr`, `somethingelse-pycharm.ipr`, `webuis-webstorm.ipr`, `myandroidapp-studio.ipr`, etc), but I'm getting the impression that the use of project files is going away or is otherwise unsupported.  If each IDE instead used different directory names, that would work, too, but they all use `.idea`.  If PyCharm used `.pycharm`, and WebStorm used `.webstorm`, etc, I think I'd be in ok shape, too.  Is the name of the directory containing project files configurable?

FYI, I filed https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-219182/IDEs-clobber-each-others-settings-AKA-support-monorepos-better as a result of this discussion.