Creating and Managing Projects

Whatever you do in PyCharm, you do that in the context of a project. A project is an organizational unit that represents a complete software solution. It serves as a basis for coding assistance, bulk refactoring, coding style consistency, and so on.

Once you have opened a folder in PyCharm, the .idea subfolder is added to it where PyCharm stores its internal configuration settings, for example, for the project code style or the version control system.

PyCharm does not support direct editing of files on remote hosts. Therefore to work with remote sources in PyCharm, you need to download them, open the folder where they are stored, and arrange them in a PyCharm project, as described in Importing Project from Existing Source Code. To keep your local and remote sources synchronized, configure automatic upload using the Upload changed files automatically to the default server list in the Deployment Options dialog.

A project in PyCharm is represented in the Directory Based Format. A project directory is marked with icon.

Such project directory contains the .idea directory, with the following files:

• *.iml file that describes the project structure.

• workspace.xml file that contains your workspace preferences.

• A number of xml files. Each xml file is responsible for its own set of settings, that can be recognized by its name: projectCodeStyle.xml, encodings.xml, vcs.xml and so on.

  Thus, for example, adding a new run/debug configuration and changing encoding will affect two different xml files. This helps avoid merge conflicts when the project settings are stored in a version control system and modified by the different team members.

All the settings files in the .idea directory should be put under version control except workspace.xml, which stores your local preferences. The workspace.xml file should be marked as ignored by VCS.

.idea directory is not visible in the Project view of the Project tool window.