How to Install CLion IDE on Arch-based Linux Distributions (Manjaro)

CLion (pronounced “Sea Lion”) is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Jetbrains and is available as a free community edition for students and a commercial edition. It is used for developing C++ programs and is one of the most popular C++ IDE on the market. A number of features are included in the tool, such as code navigation, code completion, code refactoring, syntax highlighting, linting, debugging, profiling, unit testing, and integration testing.

Since CLion is proprietary software by Jetbrains and is not available in the official repositories, we cannot install it using Pacman. So, this article will discuss the most common way to install CLion on Arch/Manjaro/Chakra.

Installation of CLion

Step 1: Update and upgrade your system by running

$ sudo pacman -Syu

Step 2: Install snap from the official Arch repositories

$ sudo pacman -S snapd

Step 3: Enable snap by using the systemctl command

$ sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

Step 4: Create a symbolic link between /var/lib/snapd/snap and /snap to enable classic support

$ sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/snap /snap

Step 5: Verify the installation by running

$ snap version

Step 6:  Finally, install CLion Idea using the snap with  the --classic flag.

$ sudo snap install clion --classic

Getting Started with CLion

Now start CLion by searching it in the application menu.

Create a new project by setting the path and selecting the required language version.

Uninstallation of Clion

To uninstall CLion along with all of its dependencies run:

$ sudo snap remove clion