Prequisites

PhpStorm is installed on your system. I did install it locally in my home directory because I am the only real user on my system. Therefore, I downloaded the PhpStorm package in my home directory and extracted the tar archive which created a folder inside my home directory. The folder has an arbitrary name (version included). Whenever an update is installed, a new folder would be created and the location would be different. To avoid this I created a symlink to have a PhpStorm folder that actually links to the current version that I have installed.

ln -s PhpStorm-222.4345.15 PhpStorm

Besides that I created a symlink in /usr/local/bin to be able to launch PhpStorm from any directory on my system.

ln -s /home/canjanix/PhpStorm/bin/phpstorm.sh /usr/local/bin/phpstorm

Config for the launcher

Having all the prerequisites we are now able to create the config so that the PhpStorm icon shows up in the Gnome Launcher and that you can hit the windows key, type phpstorm and launch the program like this.

Create a new file ~/.local/share/applications/org.gnome.phpstorm.desktop

and insert the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=PhpStorm
Comment=Web Development
Exec=phpstorm %U
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
MimeType=text/plain;
Icon=/home/canjanix/PhpStorm/bin/phpstorm.svg
Categories=Development
Actions=new-window;new-document;
Exec=phpstorm

The content is actually taken from a file in /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.*.desktop files.

Once you created the file, restart you gnome session by typing:

killall -3 gnone-shell

Now you should see PhpStorm appear if you run the launch command with the windows key and start typing.