How do I change the IntelliJ IDEA default JDK?

Question

I use IntelliJ IDEA as my development environment, and Maven for dependency management. I frequently build my project structure (directories, poms, etc) outside of IDEA and then import the project into IDEA using Import project from external model. This works great, except that in my poms I specify that the maven-compiler-plugin should use JDK 1.6, and when I import, IDEA informs me that the Language Level Changed and that Language level changes will take effect on project reload, and then prompts to reload the project. This is annoying because I always use the same JDK version.

How do I change the default JDK that IntelliJ IDEA uses, so that I don't have to reload my project every time I import a new project?

Answer 1

One other place worth checking: Look in the pom.xml for your project, if you are using Maven compiler plugin, at the source/target config and make sure it is the desired version of Java. I found that I had 1.7 in the following; I changed it to 1.8 and then everything compiled correctly in IntelliJ.

<build>
<plugins>
    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.3.2</version>
        <configuration>
            <source>1.8</source>
            <target>1.8</target>
            <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
        </configuration>
    </plugin>
</plugins>
</build>