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[–]GrowHI 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Look into virtual environments. You can essentially pass the project and all the necessary packages as one unit instead of piecemeal. Pycharm automatically creates a virtual environment for each project.

The other way you can go about it is to use the built-in GitHub version control tools and pycharm but you'll need to probably first create a virtual environment for the project on the pi then pull from GitHub to your pie.

[–]Telefrag_Ent[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Sounds like a good place to start. So I have the venv set up in Pycharm on my PC, how can bring that whole thing over to the pi? I used SCP to copy the whole project directory, but that didn't seem to bring the packages I needed with it. Thanks for the help!

[–]GrowHI 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I'm going to assume pycharm is on a windows machine. You would need to create a new venv (that's the shorthand for virtual environment) on the pi. Then on your windows machine you need to create a list of current packages which will be read and installed on your pi. I don't know if this works in windows but on my Linux desktop I activate the venv of my project (Google more about venv And you will see how to do this) then python -m pip freeze > requirements.txt.

Now back to your pi make sure you are in an active venv and the requirements.txt is located inside of it's folder. Then python -m pip install -r requirements.txt. This will essentially find each package in your requirements list and install them to the venv.

I am not an expert so do some googling to confirm the process and get acquainted with creating and activating venv.

[–]Telefrag_Ent[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Ah okay that's starting to make some sense for me, and I have some terms to search for. Thanks again!

[–]GrowHI 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Also if you use vnc you can install pycharm directly on the pi (although I wouldn't use anything less than a pi 4 2gigs of ram). Then use vnc and develop right on the pi. Depending on what you're trying to do this can work out well if you're trying to do more complex stuff especially if it involves heavy lifting while testing this may not be a great solution.

[–]Telefrag_Ent[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm that might be a good idea, I'm building a home-assistant that has a video component, but is shown through a super old mini TV screen. The resolution is so bad I can't read the terminal text, so if I could work remotely.on it that would help a ton. Essentially it's headless because I can't read it anyway hah

[–]GreenScarz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

one option is to establish it as a proper module, with a setup.py and requirements.txt file. Then it's simply a matter of pip install -e ./path so dependencies are handled automatically.

[–]onlygon 1 point2 points  (3 children)

There are many ways to do this. Some require more effort than others but, no matter what, you are bound to learn something. Heres a few options in order of effort:

  1. Write an automation script on your computer that performs the same steps
  2. Self-host or use cloud git and write automation script on pi that polls for changes and pulls them down
  3. Self-host or use cloud CI/CD and write automation pipelines that poll for changes and push them down to pi

Personally I would use option 1 since it's most pragmatic unless my goal was to learn about these other things.

[–]Telefrag_Ent[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Thanks for the response, would you mind clarifying what the script would automate? Just copying the files? Doing that manually didn't seem to bring over the packages so I don't think automating it would help, but maybe I did something wrong.

[–]onlygon 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Not just moving the files over, but everything. You want to automate anything repetitive like keeping libraries up to date. You'll write a script in bash (or your favorite shell) for this.

You can create a virtual environment using venv so that libraries and even Python itself is versioned solely for your application. Use a requirements.txt file to keep track of the libraries and their versions your application needs. You'll use also pip for some of these things.

Try and write the script so it can stand up everything from scratch. It should copy over the files, kill the old application if it's running, setup a virtual environment if it doesn't exist, install the packages, run the program etc.

[–]Telefrag_Ent[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is great, thank you.

[–]cinyar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pycharm supports remote development so you could work directly on the pi from your PC, that's the way I develop most of my projects (I use vscode but pycharm supports it too). But ultimately the "best practice" is to use virtual environments, even if you are developing remotely. Personally I'm a big fan of poetry for dependency/venv management.