How do I activate a virtualenv inside PyCharm's terminal?

Question

Edit:

According to https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/whatsnew/#v2016-3-venv-in-terminal, PyCharm 2016.3 (released Nov 2016) has virutalenv support for terminals out of the box

Auto virtualenv is supported for bash, zsh, fish, and Windows cmd. You can customize your shell preference in Settings (Preferences) | Tools | Terminal | check Activate virtaulenv

you also need to make sure to have the path of virtual environment path included in the content root folder of your project structure. You can go to settings (preference) | project | Project Structure | if your environment is not included in the project directory.

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***Old Method:***

Create a file .pycharmrc in your home folder with the following contents

source ~/.bashrc
source ~/pycharmvenv/bin/activate

Use your virtualenv path as the last parameter.

Then set the shell Preferences->Project Settings->Shell path to

/bin/bash --rcfile ~/.pycharmrc

Update:

The preferences in Settings (Preferences) | Tools | Terminal are global.
If you use a venv for each project, remember to use current path variable and a default venv name:

"cmd.exe" /k ""%CD%\venv\Scripts\activate"" 

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For Windows users: when using PyCharm with a virtual environment, you can use the /K parameter to cmd.exe to set the virtual environment automatically.

PyCharm 3 or 4: Settings, Terminal, Default shell and add /K <path-to-your-activate.bat>.

PyCharm 5: Settings, Tools, Terminal, and add /K <path-to-your-activate.bat> to Shell path.

PyCharm 2016.1 or 2016.2: Settings, Tools, Terminal, and add ""/K <path-to-your-activate.bat>"" to Shell path and add (mind the quotes). Also add quotes around cmd.exe, resulting in:

"cmd.exe" /k ""C:\mypath\my-venv\Scripts\activate.bat""

For Windows users when using PyCharm and a virtual environment under Windows, you can use the /k parameter to cmd.exe to set the virtual environment automatically.

Go to Settings, Terminal, Default shell and add /K <path-to-your-activate.bat>.

I don't have the reputation to comment on the earlier response so posting this corrected version. This really saves a LOT of time.

Update:

Note: Pycharm now supports virtual environments directly and it seems to work well for me - so my workaround not needed anymore.

PyCharm 4 now has virtualenvs integrated in the IDE. When selecting your project interpreter, you can create, add, or select a virtualenv. They've added a "Python Console" that runs in the configured project interpreter.

More info here.

If You are using windows version it is quite easy. If you already have the virtual environment just navigate to its folder, find activate.bat inside Scripts folder. copy it's full path and paste it in pycharm's terminal then press Enter and you're done!

If you need to create new virtual environment :

Go to files > settings then search for project interpreter, open it, click on gear button and create the environment wherever you want and then follow first paragraph.

Based on answers from Peter and experimentation, I've come up with a good "general solution", which solves the following:

• Restores the behaviour of a login shell. PyCharm normally runs a login shell, but --rcfile stopped this happening. Script still uses --rcfile, but attempts to emulate the INVOCATION behaviour of a login shell.
• Removes the need to create an rcfile for each environment
• Removes the need to update the project settings if you change the environment.

Drop this script into a bin directory somewhere. E.g. ~/bin/pycharmactivate

if [ -r "/etc/profile" ] ; then . /etc/profile ; fi
if [ -r "~/.bash_profile" ] ; then
    . ~/.bash_profile
elif [ -r "~/.bash_login" ] ; then
    . ~/.bash_login
elif [ -r "~/.profile" ] ; then
    . ~/.profile
fi
ACTIVATERC=`cat .idea/workspace.xml | perl -n -e 'print "\$1/bin/activate" if m:option name="SDK_HOME" value="\\\$USER_HOME\\\$(.*)/bin/python":'`
if [ -n "$ACTIVATERC" ] ; then . "$HOME/$ACTIVATERC" ; else echo "Could not find virtualenv from PyCharm" ; fi

Then set PyCharm's Shell path to:

/bin/bash --rcfile ~/bin/pycharmactivate