Setting up PyCharm for development

Goal

After having checked out your project you want to get started and develop on existing modules. There you need to open your freshly created or checked out project in PyCharm.

First mark your src-Directory as Sources Root: Right click on the directory in the Project view, nearly at the bottom select “Mark directory as” and select “Sources Root”. The src directory should now appear in blue. Next some more things need to be working in order for your module to start:

  • A working Docker-Environment

  • Generation of docker-compose files using the CLI.

  • Active Environment Variables

Docker

Attention:

You need to be in the docker-Group on your Linux system to be allowed to start docker containers and the docker service needs to be running.

To check you can run docker container ls to see any potentially running docker containers or you will receive a, hopefully, helpful error message.

You may use the commandline to work with the file generated in build/deployments/*/docker-compose.yaml

More intuitive for beginners is the use of the PyCharm Docker-Plugin:

  1. Install in PyCharm with File -> Settings -> Plugins

  2. Search for Docker and install the plugin

  3. After restarting PyCharm you can start single docker containers as well as the complete project with all containers from the GUI. Just open the corresponding docker-compose.yaml file.

Environment Variables

A lot of services within docker depend on a proper setup of environment variables just as some helpers and clients within the framework. To bring data into Docker containers this is, next to configuration files mounted into the volume, one of the classical methods.

It is possible to define all environment variables in a .env-file. This is recommended as PyCharm can read this file:

  1. Install in PyCharm with File -> Settings -> Plugins

  2. Search for EnvFile (Plugin by Borys Pierov) in the market place and install the plugin. If the plugin does not show up you may have to restart PyCharm and try again.

  3. Restart Pycharm or the plugin menu wont appear in the next step

Starting your services

Now it’s time to make your module ready for the first start:

  1. Right Click on the run.py of your service

  2. Below Run and Debug there is a Python Symbol with “Create ‘run’…”, click it

  3. In the Tab “EnvFile” activate “Enable EnvFile” and on the right select the + and add your .env-File from build/deployments/your_deployment/.env

    Hint: You may need to make hidden files visible using the Eye-Icon in the selection field Hint: Instead of using your own deployment you can also refer to the already created deployment “integration_test”, which should provide sufficient defaults. Hint: Please make sure to add the env-File from build dir because the generated .env file will also append defaults for hosts and ports to services which are missing in the original .env file.

  4. Change the working directory to the root of your project, so remove everything in the field starting at src (src must not be in the line any more).

  5. Optional: You may provide a Name for the configuration, e.g. MyModule to differentiate between various run-Configs for all of your modules

  6. Click OK

Technically your service is now able to start. But you usually will need at least a message broker to be running for everything to start up. Please refer to the next tutorial at fiot CLI Introduction - Generating config files, building Docker containers about how to create proper configurations to get the infrastructure services started.