How to set up remote development in an air-gapped environment

Question

How can remote development be used without an Internet connection in an air-gapped environment (offline)?

Answer

As a prerequisite, you need a computer with an Internet connection to download IDE distributions.

You can create a self-hosted distribution server inside your local network to distribute multiple client versions to users. Please refer to the related manual: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/fully-offline-mode.html

However, the approach above is not convenient for personal usage. As an alternative, you can do the following:

1. Get the latest IDE version for your local machine and install it: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/
2. Get the latest IDE for your remote server: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/?section=linux
3. The key point of the previous two steps is to obtain the IDE builds with exactly the same build number for both platforms.
4. Launch the local IDE and connect to a remote server.
5. On the «Choose IDE and Project» step, click on the «Installation Options» button and choose «Upload Installer File».
6. Select an archive from step two on your local machine and proceed.
7. Since the local and remote IDE versions match, the client will be extracted from the local IDE installation.