Let us show you how to install PyCharm on a Ubuntu 16.04 system. PyCharm is a state-of-the-art Python IDE designed around productivity and functionality. It offers a wide array of features, such as a graphical debugger, refactoring tools, an intelligent code editor and so on. The community version is free of charge, while the professional version costs a small fee. This fee gets you extra functionality, such as a coding environment for web development, remote development, as well as database support. While it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, for this tutorial we will be focusing solely on Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PyCharm on your Ubuntu 16.04 system. As a prerequisite, Java must be installed on your system in order to run PyCharm. So, we will first show you the installation process for Java for Ubuntu 16.04.
Step 1: Check if you already have the Java Development Kit installed
If you have a JDK installed, then there is no need for you to complete steps 1 and 2. To see your version of the JDK, open a terminal on your system and enter the following command:
java -version
If you get an output similar to “The program ‘java’ can be found…”, or “java: command not found”, then you do not have any version of Java installed. If you do not have Java installed, proceed to step 2.
Step 2: Install OpenJDK 8
To install OpenJDK 8, the open source variant of the Java Development Kit, execute the following command, followed by your user account’s password.
sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-8-jre-headless
This can take a couple of minutes since the combined install size is somewhat large in size. The download speed will depend on your internet connection.
Once the installation process is done, execute the following command to check your java version:
java -version
The first line of output should look similar to this:
openjdk version "1.8.0_151"
If it does, then you have successfully installed OpenJDK on your Ubuntu system.
Step 3: Add the Ubuntu Make repository
In order to install PyCharm, we will need to add the Ubuntu Make repository. Enter the following command to install the new repo:
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-make
Once this is done, proceed to step 4.
Step 4: Finish the installation of the new repository
In order to finish the installation of Ubuntu Make, we must update apt-get. Do this by executing the following command:
sudo apt-get update
Once that is finished, you can proceed to step 5.
Step 5: Install umake
Before installing PyCharm, we must install the ubuntu-make package using the following command:
sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-make
When finished, move onto step 6.
Step 6: Install PyCharm on Ubuntu with umake
To install the community version of PyCharm, execute the following command:
umake ide pycharm
To install the professional version of PyCharm, execute this command:
umake ide pycharm-professional
Umake will prompt you to choose an install directory. If you want, you can change this. But for this tutorial, we will leave it unchanged (/home/<username here>/.local/share/umake/ide/pycharm). Because PyCharm is a large program, the download and install process can take a few minutes.
Once this is done, you can now go back to your Ubuntu desktop, where you will find PyCharm on your sidebar. Simply click the icon to run it.