Here’s a fun one – how do you get RubyMine to access environment variables when you’ve got dependencies on those awful little things in your code and can’t get around it? Well, assuming you’re using a Mac (you are using a Mac, aren’t you?), here’s the magic incantation to get it to work:

vi ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

and then…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>M2_REPO</key>
    <string>/Users/david/.m2/repository</string>
    <key>MAVEN_OPTS</key>
    <string>-XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Xmx512m</string>
  </dict>
</plist>

Then reboot your machine. Voila! Your environment variables should now be available for RubyMine (this works for IntelliJ Idea as well). Here’s some additional information about environment.plist files, too.