How to use PyCharm with Google compute engine

Question

I have a compute engine instance running on Google cloud platform.

I would like to use the Python interpreter of the compute engine as a remote interpreter with Pycharm. This means that I would be using Pycharm on my local machine and running computations remotely.

Any clue on how to achieve this?

Solution 1

The following requires, as James Hirschhorn pointed out, the Professional verison of PyCharm.

1. Assign a public IP to the remote machine on GCP.
2. Run gcloud compute config-ssh to automatically add the VMs of your project to your ~/.ssh/config or manually add the public IP of your VM to it. If you skipped step 1. then you have to run gcloud compute config-ssh every time you re-start the remote VM, because it always gets a new IP assigned. The ~/.ssh/config gets populated with many entries in the following format:

   Host the-vm-host-name  # use this in PyCharm's Host field
       HostName 123.456.789.00  # the VM's IP address
   

3. Use the Host name of the remote you want to connect in your Deployment configuration in PyCharm
4. Add a remote interpreter: select the remote server from the drop-down (the one previously created) and point PyCharm to the executable python of your Python installation.
5. Done

Solution 2

My understanding is that you need the Pycharm Ultimate Edition to support remote servers. If you have Ultimate, then you can follow these instructions.

Solution 3

It's fairly easy to accomplish. You need:

1. PyCharm Pro

2. Create and format SSH keys

3. Config your Compute Engine instance with the SSH keys

4. Configure PyCharm

You can follow this tutorial that I wrote.

Comments

[Gulzar]

How do you accomplish step 4? or 3 for that matter

[patzm]

ok damn it, I will update the post above to answer your question. Comments don't format well.

[MattiH]

Thanks, the tutorial was great. I still struggle to actually run the scripts in GCP even if my pycharm says it uses remote python. I probably need to move the files I run somehow to my VM instance on GCP, I guess.

[gidutz]

When you set it up correctly alongside the run configuration there should be a deployment set up. Read about how to deploy your code to the remote machine jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/tutorial-deployment-in-product.ht‌​ml

[MattiH]

Thanks gidutz. Yes, actually for some reason the directory path in my pycharm configuration had been done incorrectly in the automated setup. I had to go and manually correct the target path. Now it works like a dream. :)