Cannot update IntelliJ IDEA in Mac OS X

I recently got a error about update IntelliJ IDEA. The error as follows:

IDEA does not have write access to /Volumes/IntelliJ IDEA 14/IntelliJ IDEA Please run it by a privileged user to update.

So I cannot update. Please show me how to solve this problem.

5 Answers

How I managed to resolve this is by changing the owner on IntelliJ .app file, good ol' chown

sudo chown -R <your id> /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ 14.app

I was in the same situation as the bug listed above by Greg (the original install was done by our IT admin and I am also an admin user on the machine).

3

It looks like you are running IntelliJ IDEA from a mounted read-only disk image (DMG file) that you downloaded. You need to drag the "IntelliJ IDEA 14.app" program into your application folder and run it from your hard drive.

I had similar problem, but in my case, the computer is shared, so I can't change owner of folder. But I'm on admin group. By running this command update works.

sudo chmod -R g+w /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ 

In my case quitting the app and relaunching it helped.


I think that my problem was that I actually had IntelliJ IDEA already updated but not relaunched as:

  • before quitting updater shown updates available to install (and the error message when trying to apply them),
  • after relaunch updater told me that I already have the latest version.


My other theory is that I had issues as I use 2 user accounts on my Mac and I may have been hit by something similar to this bug. But both first and second run of the app was done by the same user this time, so this shouldn't be the case here.

2

You can also use the Toolbox app to update IntelliJ.

1

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