Often times you may have a need to spin up multiple machines to test out an application you are developing. Frequently this can lead you to install all manner of software and frameworks on your local laptop. Overtime this may lead to application conflicts or just a plain mess. With IntelliJ IDEA and Docker, it’s now quite easy to deploy your application into a Docker container or containers directly from your IDE with the click of a button....

The past year has seen tremendous growth and support for Containerization within the Development space. Containers provide a fast and easy way to fire up a multitude of different development, test, and even production environments. Unfortunately Docker does not run natively on OSX, an abstraction layer is needed to create a Container Runtime Host for the Docker service to run on. Enter VMware AppCatalyst and Project Photon: Project Photon: A lightweight purpose built Linux Container Runtime Host currently released as an Open Source Tech Preview project by VMware AppCatalyst: A CLI/RESTful API driven lightweight hypervisor for OSX which provides a perfect environment for running Photon instances hosting Docker services The goal of this article is to walk the user through the initial configuration steps required to integrate VMware AppCatalyst with IntelliJ IDEA....