Best Practices for Accelerating and Encouraging Consistent IDE setups

[minor mauve]

Hello, I am working on a project that will likely end up with hundreds of active contributors within an organization. I anticipate the majority of contributors will be using IntelliJ, but some will inevitably insist on using Eclipse, VSCode, or even vim.

Contributors today need to do several things to get going. Examples include: download and use a specific JDK (Corretto 17), trust some certificates, retrieve a secret and store it in a file locally, set up code formatting, and configure some environment variables.

Does anyone have experience/words of advice with trying to ease the setup and onboarding experience for new contributors? Thanks!

Edit: For what it's worth, the application is built using spring boot

[subtle sky]

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[lone palm]

Yeah, with spring boot it's pretty easy. And you will be using gradle or maven as the build tool. Both of those offer the ability to include a "wrapper" script with the project which means each contributor invokes the exact same version of the build tool.

Spring boot also has very nice support for secrets/runtime config. I'd recommend just reading the docs for that, but essentially, you can prepare a sample/template configuration file that's included, and allow developers to prepare their own local, gitignored configuration file which supplies only the things they need.