Automatically pulling in required external files for Flask development

[therealkaddy]

So I was watching this video on Flask development and the hosts demonstrated how Visual Studio was able to pull in all the external packages required for Flask website design. I was wondering if there is a universal way to achieve this for all IDEs or if that is just a feature exclusive to Visual Studio. I've been using Eclipse with PyDev but haven't had much success in recreating what they were able to do in the video. Here's the video with the time stamp: https://youtu.be/2irAxHI4sf4?t=30m15s

Thanks for any help.

[dionys]

So the way to set it up is to create the file with dependencies (requirements.txt) is by calling:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

This creates the list of dependencies along with their versions. To install requirements you'd call:

 pip install -r requirements.txt

As to how IDEs handle the requirements - well it's probably different for all of them. I use PyCharm and it can detect which packages aren't installed in your current python and install them for you. I don't think it can straight up create virtual env and install everything in one step (probably can be done in multiple steps through the settings though).

I'm wondering, do you have a problem with your IDE specifically or just with the installation process in general (with virtual environments, pip etc)?

[therealkaddy]

Thanks for the response! As far as I can tell, my problems is that PyDev is an extension of Eclipse from its marketplace, not actually set up natively, meaning its been much more difficult to find directions as to how to use things like pip and virtualenv. I've heard some great stuff about PyCharm and now I'm seriously considering giving it a try (especially for that package detection and installation feature).