It could have been so easy. I have been using Eclipse for a long time when I was still developing Java application. Now I wanted to setup an IDE for Python and to challenge me, I would try a different one – namely Eric. Oh boy, this was a bit more complicated. Took me actually a few hours to find out.

My configuration

To play around with Python more easily, especially when trying Data Science approaches on data, sometimes packages like numpy and scipy are helpful.

Well, with my standard Python 3 installation nothing of this worked out of the box. So I installed Anaconda, which brings all those packages bundled and everything worked out of the box.

Great success, I thought! It was for the Data Science stuff, though. But not for Eric. I couldn’t install some neccessary packages by the life of me.

Reinstalling old friends

So I tried what everyone would obviously do – deinstall Anaconda and reinstall Python 3.

Then I wanted to follow the (very simple) instructions I found here:

pip3 install PyQt5
pip3 install QScintilla
cd to/the/folder/eric/was/unzipped/in
python install.py

And it worked! Eric6 started up when I typed in the command line

eric6

Then I followed a few configuration tipps which came from here to activate autocompletion for Python 3 and some tuning here and there. I was ready to go! Wouldn’t it be cool to directly create a Django project in the IDE?

Plug me in

Stack Overflow never fails me. So I installed the Django plugin and tried if I could create a Django project.

Not yet.

Maybe I need to install the packages as well?

pip3 install django

After that I restarted Eric and I could create Django projects! Yay!

Unfortunately, the Start Server option doesn’t work. So I had to go into the directory, open a command shell and start the server myself

python manage.py runserver

Then I could access my web page locally over 127.0.0.1:8000

How cool is that? Now I can start doing stuff. Nice!

Photo by geirt.com