Fixing not starting PHPStorm / other IntelliJ IDE
Problem
My PHPStorm does not start anymore, just sitting idle without any window (windows 10)
First try: running without 3rd party plugins
Locate your Intellij (or IntelliJ based IDE) executable. If you are using Jetbrain’s toolbox go the bugged IDE'
s Settings
page inside toolbox, expand Configuration
and you should see something like
C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\Toolbox\apps\PhpStorm\ch-0
Now open a terminal/windows cmd etc. and run
C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\Toolbox\apps\PhpStorm\ch-0\phpstorm64.exe disableNonBundledPlugins
If you are lucky and your IDE starts disable all potentially offending 3rd party plugins and re-enable them one by one.
Sadly I wasn’t so lucky this time…
Solution
After checking the logs (%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%/AppData/Local/Jetbrains/PhpStorm2021.2/log/idea.log
) I found an error
at the end of the log file.
java.net.BindException: Address already in use: bind
somewhere in Netty, a common java server framework which is used inside IntelliJ for internal communication.
As it turned out it tries to open a port between 6942 and 6991. Somehow no port was free anymore as there seems problem
with releasing ports with winnat
as suggested in a docker bug report.
If you encounter this problem you have to run following commands in an administrator elevated terminal
net stop winnat
net start winnat
or as an alternative
netsh winsock reset
if you don’t mind restarting your computer.