Blank inspector in IntelliJ

[HughPowell]

Hi,

The Portal Inspector window in IntelliJ remains blank when trying to open it. This appears to be true for all my projects, including new ones.

Are there any debugging steps I can try or logging I can provide to help solve this issue?

Reproduction

Create an empty project with the following deps.edn

{:paths ["src"]
 :deps {org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.12.4"}
        djblue/portal {:mvn/version "0.62.2"}}}

Create a default REPL configuration

Start the REPL and Portal with the following code:

/home/home/.jdks/openjdk-23.0.1/bin/java ...
Connecting to local nREPL server...
Clojure 1.12.4
nREPL server started on port 35859 on host localhost - nrepl://localhost:35859
(require '[portal.api :as portal])
=> nil
(portal/open {:launcher :intellij})
=> {:session-id #uuid "d15c6115-50cd-47ee-a626-d703f9d542b4"}

Expected outcome

The Portal Inspector displays the navigation bar and an empty metadata list

Actual outcome

The Inspector remains blank. It is the top pane in the screenshot below

Notes

Executing the (portal/open) form opens the Chrome Portal Inspector as expected.

Versions

IntelliJ 2025.3.3

Cursive 2025.2.1-253

Portal Inspector 0.62.2

[djblue]

Hi @HughPowell, to determine if this is an issue with the Intellij plugin or something else, are you able to open Portal outside of Intellij? Also, can you verify you have a .portal/intellij.edn and that if you manually remove it, it gets automatically recreated when you restart your editor?

[HughPowell]

Hi @djblue, thanks for the quick response. Here are the answers to your questions.

... are you able to open Portal outside of Intellij?

Yes. If I require portal and call the zero argument open function like so

/home/home/.jdks/openjdk-23.0.1/bin/java ...
WARNING: tap> already refers to: #'clojure.core/tap> in namespace: user, being replaced by: #'user/tap>
Connecting to local nREPL server...
Clojure 1.12.4
nREPL server started on port 43769 on host localhost - nrepl://localhost:43769
(require '[portal.api :as portal])
=> nil
(portal/open)
=> {:session-id #uuid "cc638555-60b5-4554-adc9-23cd37e0dd7d"}

It opens in a dedicated Chrome browser

Also, can you verify you have a .portal/intellij.edn ...

Yes, it currently looks like

{:host "localhost", :port 46821}

... and that if you manually remove it, it gets automatically recreated when you restart your editor?

If I close IntelliJ down, rm -rf the .portal directory and restart IntelliJ portal/intellij.edn is created with the following contents

{:host "localhost", :port 46647}

[djblue]

So with those answers, everything should be working. I'm not able to reproduce the issue with a similar setup on Windows or Linux with the versions specified.

You could try closing the Portal panel before calling portal.api/open, then opening it. The embedded browser that is hosting the Portal UI can be a bit odd sometimes.

[HughPowell]

I'm on Linus, using Pop_OS 22.04.

You could try closing the Portal panel before calling portal.api/open, then opening it. The embedded browser that is hosting the Portal UI can be a bit odd sometimes.

That produces the same response. The inspector is still blank.