Remote debugging is one feature I didn’t realize I needed until I worked in a team where I was integrating towards a third party that was calling my code.

If the project you are working on is “independent” from third parties it’s usually easy to test and debug locally to reproduce any issues. The same would be true if you call the third party but they never call you. Then remote debugging is probably of little value to you.

If calls are coming from a third party this might not be as easy. You can’t just ask your third party to redirect their calls to your local machine.

To be able to do remote debugging you need to add some command line parameters. Typically you only want these in your test environment.

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8081,server=y,suspend=y

After that, you can connect with IntelliJ using a remote debug “Run profile” with settings similar to the following.

When you start that run profile you can debug similar to what you could locally. Some features like reassigning variables and hot-swapping won’t be available though.