How to install PyCharm on Ubuntu for beginners

Download PyCharm for Ubuntu

Before installing PyCharm we need to download it from the official site. For the purpose of this tutorial I am going to download the community edition. There is also a professional edition, but I do not like paying for it at the moment :)

Visit this link to download PyCharm from the official site. Once you have visited the website click on the DOWNLOAD NOW button like shown below.

Install required packages by PyCharm

After the download is finished, we need to install JDK because PyCharm depends on it. So open Ubuntu Software Center and in the search box type java like shown in the following screenshot.

Click in one of the OpenJDK and make sure to install it, so we can continue with the installation of PyCharm.

Install PyCharm 

Go to your Downloads folder and move the PyCharm source package to Desktop like shown in the following screenshot.

We need to extract the archive so we can get the files so do a right click with the mouse and select Extract Here.

Once the extract is done open a new console (CTRL+ALT+T) and use the following command to navigate inside pycharm.

cd Desktop/pycharm-community-5.0.4/ # or whatever your version is

Run the ls command while in this directory like shown below.

ls

The output should be similar to the one shown below.

bin  build.txt  help  helpers  lib  license  plugins

What is in our interest is the bin directory. There is a bash script inside this directory, a script that automates the installation for us.

So all we need to do is run this script.

Navigate to the bin directory with the following command.

cd bin

Then make the pycharm.sh script executable with the following command.

sudo chmod +x  pycharm.sh

Once done you can run the pycharm.sh script like shown below.

./pycharm.sh

The following will come up asking you if you want to setup a fresh PyCharm IDE or you want to import settings from a custom location.

Leave it as default and click OK.

Then you will be presented to the following.

 

 

Click OK and type the system password when asked. You are done :)

Now you can create a new project or import an old one.

Conclusion

In this article I showed you how to install PyCharm on any Ubuntu version with the help of the pycharm.sh shell script.

The instructions on tutorial will probably work on any version of Linux that come with the Bash shell, but I have only tested them in my Ubuntu machine.

If you have any question please leave it in the comments. Happy coding :)