GlassFish 7 in IntelliJ Idea
To use GlassFish Server in IntelliJ Idea, you’ll need:
- The IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate edition
- The Jakarta EE: Application Servers plugin enabled
In recent versions of Intellij IDEA, you’ll also need to install the GlassFish plugin, which is not bundled in the Application Servers plugin in newer versions.
To find out how to configure and use GlassFish in IntelliJ Idea, read the following documentation:
For GlassFish 7.1 and newer
The current version of the GlassFish plugin in IntelliJ requires an additional hack to make it work with GlassFish 7.1 or newer. This is because newer versions of GlassFish cleaned up the boostrap configuration, moving some internal classes to a different location. The IntelliJ plugin depends on those internal classes and can’t find them.
To fix this and help the plugin to find the required classes, you can do one of the following steps:
The recommended fix
Find your IntelliJ config directory, e.g. path/to/JetBrains/IntelliJIdea2025.2. In that directory, you’ll find a JAR file Glassfish/lib/specifics/glassfish5.1-specifics.jar .
Now, find another JAR, in a GlassFish 7.1 or newer installation, in glassfish/lib/bootstrap/glassfish-jdk-extensions.jar. Open the glassfish-jdk-extensions.jar file with a ZIP archiving application and copy the whole org directory into the glassfish5.1-specifics.jar file.
Now you can continue using GlassFish from IntelliJ as usual.
The simpler fix
If you struggle to follow the recommended fix, you can instead just modify the GlassFish installation as follows:
Inside a GlassFish installation, find the JAR file glassfish/lib/bootstrap/glassfish-jdk-extensions.jar. Copy that file into the glassfish/modules directory in the same GlassFish installation.
Now you can continue using GlassFish from IntelliJ as usual.