JetBrains Projector Docker images
Tags: jetbrains, projector, docker, images
Published: 2021-04-13 19:08:46

---
title: JetBrains Projector Docker images
published: true
date: 2021-04-13 09:49:57 UTC
tags: jetbrains,projector,docker,images
canonical_url: https://www.kaidos.me/2021/04/13/jetbrains-projector-images/
---

In the world of IDEs JetBrains has some widely used solutions like IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. Microsoft with VSCode has been steadily gaining traction the last few years as it’s a really nice product, albeit much simpler and reduced in functionality compared to JetBrains’ products or Eclipse.

The pandemic that changed our workspace and habbits the last year has seen VSCode exploding due to a killer feature; remote development. This feature allows the user of the IDE to have it automatically install a server instance in a remote server and use the local window as a frontend. This means that code development, indexing, builds and everything happens remotely (over SSH) and the user is not involved in setting up complex setups to do this; he just works with the IDE as if it was local development.

The use cases for this kind of setup are varying. Some companies require employees to develop on remote servers and not check out code on their home computers for security reasons. Other people develop directly on cloud instances to replicate the production environment. And other people like me, want to use their power-horse headless server to develop because their measly laptop is not up to par.

So JetBrains has been loosing clients to VSCode and has been working on a feature for [remote development](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455) for quite a few months now and has provided the Projector solution as an attempt to remedy the problem.

[Projector](https://github.com/JetBrains/projector-server) is a server that can run any Java Swing application and “project” the UI over HTTP(S) to a remote client. All JetBrains IDEs happen to be Swing applications so there you have it. The remote client may be a browser or an Electron app developed by JetBrains called Projector Client.

You can install the Projector server as a plugin to the IDE and connect to it, but this doesn’t cover most of the use cases where the server is headless (like an AWS instance). Projector can run headless of course but then the user needs to manually install it in the remote machine, connect it with the IDE and start it before connecting to it. It’s not very streamlined yet as you can understand.

Thankfully JetBrains has created a project to package their IDEs and [projector as Docker containers](https://github.com/JetBrains/projector-docker) which greatly eases the process. But for some strange reason they don’t upload the container images in DockerHub and they don’t even maintain their privately hosted images. The current IDEA image is several months old at version 2020.2.1 while the current latest is 2021.1. They have an [issue](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PRJ-284) about that, but no indication of resolution.

Thus I decided to create a semi-automatic process that will use the projects created by JetBrains and will build and upload to DockerHub images for all their IDEs, the [Jet-Builder](https://github.com/projectorimages/jet-builder). This project uses git tags to trigger different build jobs in DockerHub. All the created images can be found [here](https://hub.docker.com/u/projectorimages). I believe I will be able to trigger the build job soon after new versions are released until I make a scrapper to collect their release announcements automatically.

- [IntelliJ IDEA Community](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-idea-c)
- [PyCharm Community](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-pycharm-c)
- [IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-idea-u)
- [PyCharm Professional](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-pycharm-p)
- [WebStorm](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-webstorm)
- [Rubymine](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-rubymine)
- [PhpStorm](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-phpstorm)
- [Rider](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-rider)
- [Datagrip](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-datagrip)
- [GoLand](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-goland)
- [CLion](https://hub.docker.com/r/projectorimages/projector-clion)

You can use the [instructions](https://github.com/JetBrains/projector-docker/blob/12ae87c11899a69b89b5fd5cb636d8e4ae2b18ad/README.md) provided by JetBrains to run these projector images, replacing their images with the ones above. Or wait for my next blog post!