intellij_ramdisk_target

Automatically sets up build directory links for Intellij editors when using ramdrives.

Status

This project is made for personal use and to get used to Rust. You may use this project at your own risk.

Caution is advised, as it may kill your cat or have some other surprising behaviour.

See limitations below.

How to use

This is written is Rust. As such you may download a binary from the releases page (Linux/x86_64 only) or build it yourself.

The program expects two arguments:

1. the full path of the directory on the ramdrive (the link destination)
2. the full path of the directory to be linked (the "build" directory, aka the link source)

Example

IntelliJ currently has a limitation that doesn't allow creating run configurations from arbitrary binaries. To circumvent this, create a shell script that wraps the binary:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

/path/to/intellij_ramdisk_target $@

This script passes all its arguments to the wrapper binary.

• In the IDE go to Settings -> Tools -> Startup Tasks
• Click Add new configuration -> Shell script
• Add the path to the shell wrapper
• Add the arguments on the format below:

intellij_ramdisk_target --projdir ~/code/some_project/target --ramdir /run/user/$UID/code/some_project/target

Requirements

I'm only testing it using the latest stable Rust and on Linux/x86_64. There is actually a tight dependency on unix, so it won't work on Windows. YMMV on Mac OS.

Limitations

The code is not tested. The basic functionality works, but it may fail on some corner cases.

It's basically a quick and dirty solution to automate the creation of the target directory in IntelliJ.

This is one of my first forays in Rust, so the code might be somewhat naive.

Motivation

I'm sometimes using a computer with an old SSD to develop Rust projects.

In order to avoid excessive wear through write amplification, I'm putting the target folder on a ramdrive.

This project was born out of a need to automate creation and symlinking of the required directories while using IntelliJ.

Acknowledgements

This work was inspired by this blog post.

License

The code is released under the termes of the BSD 3-clause License. Please see LICENSE for the full text of the license.