I do most of my programming from my windows laptop and/or desktop computer. However, in order to be able to develop anything sane, I need to operate fully in Linux. I used to have to dualboot or even to have two machines, but now that I have access to a stable server I can safely ssh into, I would rather just use my IDE to develop directly on it. Lucky enough for me, PyCharm has an option for it.

A how-to guide to do this is pretty straightforward, well-explained on the PyCharm blog and docs explaining how to configure a remote server that is not a Vagrant box.

There are three steps in the configuration:

• setting up the deployment server and auto-update
• setting up the remote interpreter
• setting up the run configuration

Setting up the deployment server:

Tools | Deployment | Configuration > configure your sftp server, go ahead and perform the root autodetection (usually the /home/uname) and uncheck the “available only for this project. You will need that last option in order to configure the remote interpreter. Go ahead, go into the mapping, perform the equivalence mappings for the project, but be aware the home from the previous screen, if filled, would be prepended to any path you try to map to on the remote server. So if you want your project to go to /home/uname/PycharmProjects/my_project and your root is /home/uname/, the path you are mapping to needs to be /PycharmProjects/my_projet.

Now, head to the Tools | Deployment click the automatic upload, so that every edit you do on your machine is constantly uploaded to the remote server.

Setting up the remote interpreter:

Head to the File | Settings | Project | Interpreter, click on the cogwheel and click on add remote. At that point by default PyCharm will fill in the properties for the “deployment configuration”. In my case I needed to tweak a bit the python interpreter path, since I use Anaconda Python (scientific computing). If like me you use Anaconda2 and store it in your home directory, you will need to replace the interpreter path by /home/uname/anaconda/bin/python. At that point, just click save and you are good for this part.

Setting up the run configuration:

With the previous two steps finished, when you go into Run | Edit configuration, add the main running script to the Script field, check that the python interpreter is configured to be the remote one and then click on the three small dots next to “path mappings” field and fill it out, at least with the location of the script on your machine mapped to it’s location on the remote.

That’s it, you are good to go!