I’m absolutely loving using PyCharm for my Python and Django development, but one of the lingering things I’ve been meaning to nail down once and for all is creating a launcher for PyCharm in Ubuntu 12.10. Despite the automated way you can attempt to do this from within PyCharm itself and all the other recommendations I’ve read I was unable to get it working.
In the mean time I also bought of copy of IntelliJ IDEA when they had some crazy back to school sale a couple of months ago (I still dabble in Groovy and Grails a bit). I was having the same issues with creating a launcher for IDEA and the typical tricks I use for Eclipse weren’t working, but luckily I came across this post that explains how to do it. The only change I made is pointing to idea64.vmoptions instead of just idea.vmoptions — other than that it works great.
That got me thinking — since PyCharm and IDEA are both made by JetBrains, and both run on Java, chances are how they work is pretty darn similar. So I decided to copy the IDEA launcher script and modify it for PyCharm, and lo and behold it worked!
Here’s my modified version of the IDEA launcher that works for PyCharm.
#!/bin/bash
export JAVA_HOME=/opt/java/jdk1.7.0_09
export JDK_HOME=/opt/java/jdk1.7.0_09
export PYCHARM_HOME=/home/mwoodward/pycharm-2.6.2
export PYCHARM_VM_OPTIONS=”$PYCHARM_HOME/bin/pycharm64.vmoptions”
export PYCHARM_PROPERTIES=”$PYCHARM_HOME/bin/idea.properties”
cd “$PYCHARM_HOME/bin”
export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1
./pycharm.sh
Obviously adjust all the paths as necessary for your machine. Make sure you chmod +x on the file, and with that in place you can open up Main Menu (sudo apt-get install alacarte if you don’t already have it installed) and add a launcher. For reference the icon lives in PyCharm’s bin directory.
Hope that helps someone else who has run into this issue.
Nice Post Matt … BTW …
I'm pretty sure if you export the env var IDEA_JDK to JAVA_HOME you can get Intellij running on your JDK of choice too …
Nice — thanks for the tip!
NP 🙂