How do i get IntelliJ to pick up my environment variables on MacOS X?

See the related questions:

  • https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/51677
  • https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/57385

Your question is not specific to IntelliJ IDEA at all.

On Mountain Lion solutions from the first link will not work, so you can do something like this in the Terminal:

export VAR_PRIVATE_GEM_USERNAME=John
open -a /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ 11.app/

Also note that many Run/Debug configurations in IntelliJ IDEA allow to set custom environment variables:

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You can set an environment variable on a Mac that will be available in all apps (not just the command line) by using "launchctl" (see https://ss64.com/osx/launchctl.html)

launchctl setenv VARIABLE_NAME VALUE