Intellij JAVA_HOME variable

Bit counter-intuitive, but you must first setup a SDK for Java projects. On the bottom right of the IntelliJ welcome screen, select 'Configure > Project Defaults > Project Structure'.

The Project tab on the left will show that you have no SDK selected:

Therefore, you must click the 'New...' button on the right hand side of the dropdown and point it to your JDK. After that, you can go back to the import screen and it should be populated with your JAVA_HOME variable, providing you have this set.

The problem is your "Project SDK" is none! Add a "Project SDK" by clicking "New ..." and choose the path of JDK. And then it should be OK.

So far, nobody has answered the actual question.

Someone can figure what is happening ?

The problem here is that while the value of your $JAVA_HOME is correct, you defined it in the wrong place.

• When you open a terminal and launch a Bash session, it will read the ~/.bash_profile file. Thus, when you enter echo $JAVA_HOME, it will return the value that has been set there.
• When you launch IntelliJ directly, it will not read ~/.bash_profile … why should it? So to IntelliJ, this variable is not set.

There are two possible solutions to this:

• Launch IntelliJ from a Bash session: open a terminal and run "/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/Contents/MacOS/idea". The idea process will inherit any environment variables of Bash that have been exported. (Since you did export JAVA_HOME=…, it works!), or, the sophisticated way:

• Set global environment variables that apply to all programs, not only Bash sessions. This is more complicated than you might think, and is explained here and here, for example. What you should do is run

  /bin/launchctl setenv JAVA_HOME $(/usr/libexec/java_home)
  

  However, this gets reset after a reboot. To make sure this gets run on every boot, execute

  cat << EOF > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/setenv.JAVA_HOME.plist
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
      "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
      <key>Label</key>
      <string>setenv.JAVA_HOME</string>
      <key>ProgramArguments</key>
      <array>
        <string>/bin/launchctl</string>
        <string>setenv</string>
        <string>JAVA_HOME</string>
        <string>$(/usr/libexec/java_home)</string>
      </array>
      <key>RunAtLoad</key>
      <true/>
      <key>ServiceIPC</key>
      <false/>
    </dict>
  </plist>
  EOF
  

  Note that this also affects the Terminal process, so there is no need to put anything in your ~/.bash_profile.