IntelliJ IDEA: multiple configurations at once

I’ve just recently come across a problem where I wanted to run 2 configurations in IntelliJ IDEA with a single keystroke.

The matter at hand was that I had a Spring Boot application with a React frontend, created using create-react-app. The Spring Boot was handled by Gradle and React with Webpack and Node.

Both the backend and the frontend were able to reload themselves upon changes in code and I didn’t want to forgo that during development by building the frontend and then serving it from the backend controller. Therefore I wanted to run them independently.

Both were in the same project so I created a configuration in IDEA for each of them. The problem was: I had to manually run each configuration to get the application app and running!

That being extremely inefficient I started searching for a way to run them “together”.

Unfortunately a quick Google search revealed that IDEA does not support such behaviour out-of-the-box. You can define a “Before launch” action, but that would not work here, as neither of the configuration terminates! They both run for as long as you want the application to run.

Fortunately, I found this StackOverflow answer mentioning an IDEA plugin called Multirun.

Sure enough, the plugin works perfectly! You can set the order of configurations and even introduce delays between them.
Now a single Shift + F10 does the trick ;)