Now, IJ is migrating to Bazel, and the preconfigured Run Configurations no longer work. At least, I see Kotlin errors while compiling.
BTW, I read:
Building the project using only IDE built-in capabilities is not supported anymore, so make sure the Bazel plugin is installed and enabled.
So, I installed the Bazel plugin, but I’m wondering how to compile and run the IDE from sources.
To run the IntelliJ IDEA that was built from source, choose ‘Run | Run’ from the main menu. This will use the preconfigured run configuration IDEA.
Unfortunately, the preconfigured Run Configuration are no longer displayed in the list of Run Configurations. I see the xml files in .idea/runConfigurations, but I guess they don’t work with Bazel.
Any help would be appreciated. Ideally, the Readme could be updated.
I’m using IntelliJ 2026.1.2 Community from Releases · JetBrains/intellij-community · GitHub. Should I switch to IJ Ultimate? I have a license, but I play with IJ sources on a dedicated machine that I cannot fully trust.
I can sync the project with success (I had to add Bazel and Bash to the PATH first), and I found the main_run Bazel task, but it fails saying
**Start Failed**
Internal error
java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid home path 'C:\ProgramData\_bazel\gkcbb2xt\execroot\_main\bazel-out\x64_windows-fastbuild\bin\main_run.exe.runfiles\${BUILD_WORKSPACE_DIRECTORY}'
at com.intellij.openapi.application.PathManager.getHomeDir(PathManager.java:133)
at com.intellij.openapi.application.PathManager.getHomePath(PathManager.java:109)
at com.intellij.openapi.application.PathManager.getBinDirectories(PathManager.java:179)
at com.intellij.openapi.application.PathManager.loadProperties(PathManager.java:824)
at com.intellij.idea.Main.mainImpl(Main.kt:79)
at com.intellij.idea.Main.main(Main.kt:66)
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JRE: 25.0.2+1-b315.62 amd64 (JetBrains s.r.o.)
C:\programdata\_bazel\gkcbb2xt\external\+jbr_toolchains+remotejbr25_win
I’m a bit lost. It says the home path is invalid, but what should I do? I have set the idea.home.path env var, but it changes nothing.
Sorry for these breakages, we are in the middle of undergoing migration to Bazel build everywhere and while the internal bigger monorepo is fully migrated, this subtree mirrored to GitHub is still not in a good shape. It has its own .idea and run configurations separate from the main
