Guide to JetBrains Projector with Coder

The Coder team provided remote development support for JetBrains IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, GoLand, RubyMine, and WebStorm. Under the hood, we used Projector, the open source project by JetBrains.

We wanted to share why we’re excited about it, what it means for the Coder community, and our perspective on the future of developing in the cloud.

When we discovered the project, we assembled a small team at Coder to focus on the implementation of Projector in our product. We’ve been implementing and optimizing the experience within Coder, submitting contributions, and working with the team to help harden the experience—all with the shared goal of bringing the benefits of developing in the cloud to more developers who want to use their preferred IDE.

What is JetBrains Projector?

Projector is an open source framework for running JetBrains IDEs and Swing apps remotely. Similar to how code-server allows you to run VS Code on any server for ease of access and additional compute power, Projector makes remote development with JetBrains IDEs a reality.

When we discovered the project, we assembled a small team at Coder to focus on the implementation of Projector in our product. For the last 5 months, we’ve been implementing and optimizing the experience within Coder, submitting contributions, and working with the team to help harden the experience—all with the shared goal of bringing the benefits of developing in the cloud to more developers who want to use their preferred IDE.

Why we’re excited about JetBrains Projector

Just like code-server, Projector brings the benefits of remote development and the power of the cloud to your favorite IDEs. This opens up the possibility to offload workloads like slow builds, test suites, and other development operations to the cloud. We believe this is the future, and we’re thrilled to bring it to more development teams through Coder.

Its counterpart is JetBrains Gateway, which makes it possible to develop with JetBrains over SSH.

Why Projector + Coder?

Projector is open source and any developer can use it by going to the Projector GitHub repo and deploying it on any machine. Coder takes care of the heavy lifting with Projector, making it simple to use for development teams who don’t want to build custom solutions for managing infrastructure, access control, and distribution.

With Coder, Projector can simply be packaged within the Coder workspace.

Check out this video of launching a JetBrains IDE from Coder:

Next steps

Projector is available on GitHub. Want to try it out for your team? Our 60-day free trial is the easiest way to get started developing securely in the cloud using your favorite JetBrains IDE.