PyCharm with ROS Integration

Setup Package Path

When following these steps, ROS-packages will be added to your PYTHONPATH. This leads to PyCharm indexing them and thus you can use auto completion. If you use Source ROS, this is not necessary.

  1. Settings –> Project:bitbots_meta –> Project Interpreter

  2. Cog at the top right next to the Interpreter –> Show All

  3. Lowest button on the right side (“Show paths for the selected interpreter”)

  4. Add –> /opt/ros/melodic/lib/python3/dist-packages

  5. Add –> <catkin_ws>/devel/lib/python3/dist-packages

Source ROS

When using this method, ROS will be sourced when starting PyCharm. This means all ROS-commands and paths are known to PyCharm. This means PyCharm knows just as much as your Shell and can theoretically do the same things.

  1. cp /usr/share/applications/pycharm-professional.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/pycharm-with-ros.desktop

  2. vim ~/.local/share/applications/pycharm-with-ros.desktop

  3. Change the name, otherwise you overwrite the global PyCharm starter.

  4. Exec=bash -c "source <catkin_ws>/devel/setup.bash; /usr/bin/pycharm %f"

Change Launch-files

To test/debug nodes in an efficient way with PyCharm, you can add the argument depends_only to your launch-file. This means, only the node you want to test will be started.

After you have started the node externally, using roslaunch, PyCharm will be able to start this node and you can debug.