Intellij - use SDK Support

[TZanke]

Description

When working with Gradle-based projects in IntelliJ IDEA, the IDE allows users to define a Project SDK (and a specific Gradle JVM). While IntelliJ's native Gradle integration respects these settings, the NX Console plugin currently does not.

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When attempting to run a Gradle task via NX Console (e.g., nx run backend:build), the execution fails if JAVA_HOME is not explicitly set in the system environment or a .env file, even if a valid SDK is configured within IntelliJ.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open an NX workspace with a Gradle-based backend in IntelliJ.
2. Set the Project SDK in File | Project Structure | Project.
3. Ensure JAVA_HOME is not set in your global OS environment.
4. Run a build task via NX Console.

Observed Behavior:

The execution fails because the environment does not inherit the IDE's SDK setting:

> nx run backend:build

Executing command: gradlew.bat build 
 
ERROR: JAVA_HOME is not set and no 'java' command could be found in your PATH. 
 
Please set the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment to match the 
location of your Java installation.

Expected Behavior:

NX Console should detect the IntelliJ Project SDK (or the configured Gradle JVM) and use it to execute the command, ensuring consistency with the native IntelliJ Gradle runner.

Motivation

• Developer Experience: Significantly speeds up the setup for new employees by reducing the need for manual environment configuration.
• SDK Management: Allows developers to easily switch between different SDKs per project without depending on or polluting global system variables.
• Consistency: Ensures that NX Console behaves as expected within the IntelliJ ecosystem.

Suggested Implementation

The plugin should programmatically retrieve the SDK path from IntelliJ and inject it into the process environment:

1. Access the ProjectRootManager to identify the current project's SDK.
2. Preferably, also check the Gradle JVM setting under Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Gradle.
3. Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable for the spawned process to the path of the detected JDK.

Alternate Implementations

• Manual Override: Add a setting in NX Console to manually point to a JDK path if the automatic detection fails.
• Environment Sync: A feature to automatically sync the IntelliJ SDK path to a local .env file used by NX.

[MaxKless]

hey! Makes perfect sense, we should've done it sooner - here's a PR for this feature :)
#3031

[MaxKless]

I'm going to release a version of this soon, but the approval process on the JetBrains side always takes a bit so it could be a couple of days until it's available to you :)

[TZanke]

Amazing! Looking forward to testing the new plugin version once it's available. Thank you very much for the quick fix!