How to manage (ana)conda with pycharm 2016.3 in linux

Question

I would like to use Anaconda and the newest Pycharm 2016.3 together. I would like to be able to manage packages in settings->interpreter. If this is not supported, I would like to know the workflow of using these two together. According to another SO question, Pycharm 5 used to have a 'Create conda env' in the interpreter settings, but this seems to be gone now. I have tried:

1) Manually creating a virtual environment with 'conda create --name project numpy' and I add the interpreter ('~/anaconda2/envs/bin/python', the location of python for my created virtual environment. However, pycharm doesn't allow me to add any packages through settings->interpreter. Running an 'import numpy' through the console shows errors that are pointing to /usr/bin/python, not my virtual env python, and an error 'ImportError: cannot import name multiarray'. I'm not sure what package to add using conda from the cli, and the pycharm frontend doesn't add packages

2) I've tried the same as 1) but with my global anaconda python as the interpeter ('~/anaconda2/bin/python') and it doesn't seem to be able to connect to the console.

3) Creating a virtual environment through pycharm directly.

I would like to remove my default pythons (/usr/bin/python2.7/3.5 from the list of interpreters in pycharm) for debugging purposes but it won't let me and it seems to be showing packages that my anaconda virtual env doens't have installed.

Is there a way to manage my VIRTUAL enviornment in Conda using pycharm? If not, what steps do I take to make these two play well together assuming I can't manage it through pycharm interepreters settings.

Answer 1

This is the normal steps that i follow when i use virutalenv with PyCharm

I normally work on ubuntu

• First, i always create a separate environment for every project using the command virtualenv "environment_name" from the command line.
• Activate the environment using the command - source environment_name/bin/activate in ubuntu.
• Suppose if i want to start a django project, i create the project using the command django-admin startproject project_name
• Open this project in pycharm.
• go to settings-> interpreter in pycharm. choose "add local" interpreter from the settings. It will open a pop-up. Go to the directory of the environment you just created and select the correct python interpreter you want to use.
• now if you want to install a new package, you can go to interpreter settings and add package from the pycharm or you can fire up the command line, activate the environment and run pip install package_name. Once the package is installed, it will also show in pycharm.
• if you are using Windows OS, use powershell to execute the above commands. The only difference will be in activating the environment. In windows, to activate an env use environment_name/Scripts/activate

EDIT: Same goes anaconda environments also, the easy way is to manage the environment from the terminal and pycharm will show the packages changes in the interpreter settings.

Answer 2

Here is what I have been doing and it works great. I create a virtual environment separately and when I create a new project in PyCharm, I point the interpreter to the python from the virtual environment. An example is shown in the picture below: