Intellij 14 won't start

Programming

Challenge

You use IntelliJ 14 (EAP) and Java 8 and now you can’t seem to get the IDE to work.

The logging says something like:

Error Message

You probably don’t have a Java 1.6 JVM installed anymore on your modern machine ;-)

Solution

The solution is to start IntelliJ with Java 1.6+ but how to do that…

Mac OSX

  • Goto your application in a terminal vi /Applications/IntelliJ<version>.app/Contents/Info.plist
  • Find the JVMVersion key and change the string value to what’s shown below
1
2
<key>JVMVersion</key>
<string>1.6+</string>
  • Save the changes.
  • Note that the * has been changed to a +
  • Start IntelliJ
  • Done.

Other Operating Systems

  • See the reference below.

Reference

Tags

Intellij, Java, JVM, 14, start, mac, osx, 1.6, 1.8