How to work within individual files rather than projects in PyCharm

Question

Relatively new to Python and PyCharm and as such most of the work. I'm doing is single files and therefore is not organized into projects.

Is there a way to configure Pycharm to be used to open single files and not use projects?

Similarly, is it possible to just run a single page/file?

Answer 1

On Pycharm 5.0.4...

1. Open the file (i.e. by double clicking in explorer)
2. Navigate to File->Settings...
3. Expand the Project tab on the left and select 'project interpreter' from the options that appear beneath
4. Set your project interpreter from the dropdown menu, and you should be able now to run your file without creating a project

Answer 2

You can always open a single file (File > Open) but to actually run or debug the code from within Pycharm, or use most of its other features, it needs a correctly configured project.

What you can do is create a single project to hold all of your "assorted" code. I usually recommend creating a virtualenv for this project as well and using that as your Pycharm project interpreter. You can further divide this project into different packages to keep things organized.

Update: PyCharm 4.5 now provide Scratch Files which seem relevant to this question.