env vars in intelliJ

In my ongoing Scalatra+Docker+Postgres project, I am doing my development with IntelliJ. IntelliJ is a fantastic tool for working with the JVM ecosystem and I am a big fan.

I got stuck trying to inject environmental variables into my app however (specifically Postgres connection info). I am used to injecting variables thru standard bash export statements, which make the variables available to sub-processes. However that wasn’t working with IntelliJ.

The reason for injecting them is to allow the code to run locally, or to run in a Docker container, and not know or care what the Postgres connection details are, just know that it can count on them being there.

Today I learned that these can be added thru an IntelliJ Run Configuration. From the docs:

When you perform run, debug, or test operations with IntelliJ IDEA, you always start a process based on one of the existing configurations using its parameters.

The key there is that “you always start a process” based on a run config. Therefore, the env vars need to be present inside that process.

Luckily they make it easy to inject variables by editing a run configuration, and now my code is working as I intended.