Last week, I wrote about two problems I had moving my project from PhpStorm to IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate (both from JetBrains.com). To recap (or you can read the entire post here), I could not get the deployment configuration to work (I set it up to sync the local sources with the web server on any explicit “Save All”), and I could not get the built-in web server (in the IDE) to open the site for testing – it was always opening the actual site on the web server (which works, but adds some network traffic and some latency).

The solution to the first problem, described in last week’s post, was for me to use the correct path for the local directory where the sources are located. Duh. As I stated last week, this was not in any way the fault of JetBrains or the IDE; it was all my doing.

The second problem I finally solved after I wrote last week’s post. Again, the fault lies solely with me. When I created the deployment configuration (and finally got it right), I had inadvertently set it up as the default deployment configuration. As the IntelliJ IDEA docs clearly state, if a deployment configuration is marked as the default, it will be used instead of the built-in web server (or any other deployment configuration, presumably). As soon as I unset the default, it went back to using the internal web server when I clicked the “Run” button to test the site.

Yes, I know this is a short blog post. I spent way too much time on these two issues – I should have just read the docs (or searched Stack Overflow) right away. Oh well, next time…

This week was supposed to find the code complete and the web app up (at dev.kobayashicoding.net) and running. As these things go, however, I found myself doing some DevOps instead of coding.

I use JetBrains tools for development. I’ve been using PhpStorm for quite some time, and recently also licensed IntelliJ IDEA because I want to start learning Kotlin (and maybe even bone up on Java). The interface for these IDEs is pretty much identical (as far as I can tell), so I’ve been using IntelliJ IDEA recently, even on projects that I started in PhpStorm – including this current project.

Somehow in moving from PhpStorm to IntelliJ IDEA, I managed to delete the deployment configuration for this project. JetBrains tools – like most others I’ve used – have built-in FTP and SFTP clients to synchronize the local code with the actual web server, and I set mine up to upload any changed files whenever I do an explicit “Save” of all changed files. When I began working on the code again last week, I noticed that neither was the code being uploaded to the server, nor did I have the usual “Browse Remote Host” pane on the right side of the IDE’s window.

A quick look at the deployment configurations revealed that there were none. So, I spent more time that I should have configuring the settings for the host. This was not JetBrains’ fault – I simply failed to use the correct path to the local folder with the code for the site. Once I realized – and corrected – that, the code got synced and the changes I’d just made magically appeared.

I haven’t been as lucky with the other issue that also appeared. Using PhpStorm, I used to be able to run the local version of the site (I’m not actually using any Php, or anything else that requires a real web server), but the “Run” icon in the toolbar was grayed out. So I clicked the “Configurations” button and looked for the appropriate template to use, but have not yet been able to recreate the configuration I need. I guess I’ll have to actually resort to looking at the docs, or even <gasp> contact JetBrains tech support – which is awesome.

Tune in next week for the exciting continuing saga…