PyCharm 2021.1 Help

Populating Projects

Populate your project by creating new elements of various types ( directories, packages and files). PyCharm suggests the following alternative ways of accessing the corresponding functionality:

  • File | New from the main menu.

  • The New context menu command.

  • The keyboard shortcut Alt+Insert.

As a result, the New menu is shown in which you select the type of an element to be created.

For generating PyCharm-specific elements, refer to Django section.

Create new files

  1. Do one of the following:
    • In the Project tool window Alt+1, select the directory or package in which you want to create a new file, and then choose File | New from the main menu.

    • Right-click the corresponding directory or package and select New from the context menu.

    • Press Alt+Insert.

  2. Select the desired file type. Generally, all the options except File, Package and Directory correspond to using a file template.

    New file menu

    An existing file template may be missing from the list if this is a custom template whose filename extension (template extension) does not match the registered patterns of any of the recognized file types. In such a case, you may want to register the corresponding pattern for an existing recognized file type or add a new file type and register the corresponding pattern for this new type. For more information, see Set file type associations.

    New Python file
  3. In the dialog that opens, type the name of the file in the corresponding field. Note that you should not type the filename extension.

    Adding a new Python file

    You can specify the whole directory structure prepending the new filename. If the nested directories do not yet exist, they will be created.

    Creating a new directory and a file

    New template based file

    If required, specify the kind of the new template-based file, its extension, and other parameters. For example, if you select to create an HTML file, you'll be able to create HTML, HTML4, or XHTML file. In other words, use one of the corresponding related file templates.

    Specify other information as required. For example, you may be asked to define the values of custom variables if the corresponding file template contains such variables and their values are not currently set.

  4. Click OK. The new file that corresponds to the selected file template will be created under the target location.

    If the names of non-existent sub-directories were specified before the new filename, the whole structure will be created under the target directory:

    New file

    Sometimes, you may want to change the auto-generated filename extension. To do that, use the Rename refactoring(Refactor | Rename).

Create directories

  1. Open the Project tool window (for example View | Tool Windows | Project).

  2. Select the destination directory.

  3. Do one of the following:

    • Select File | New | Directory.

    • Select New | Directory from the context menu.

    • Press Alt+Insert and select Directory.

    Create a directory
  4. In the dialog that opens, specify the directory name. If you want to create a number of nested directories, specify the directory names separated with slashes.
    New Directory dialog

    Press Enter to complete the task.

PyCharm makes it possible to create Python packages recursively, thus creating the whole package structure.

The Python package nodes are marked with the package icon.

Create Python Packages

  1. In the Project tool window, select the destination directory.

  2. From the context menu of the selection, choose New | Python Package, or press Alt+Insert to invoke the context menu:

    Create a package
  3. In the New Package dialog that opens, specify the package name.
    You can also specify nested packages; in this case, the names should be delimited with dots:

    package name


    Click OK. PyCharm creates the new package or package structure:

    generate package


Now that you created a package, you can do the following:

  • Import the package into the project files. Use code completion to discover it.

    importing a custom package

  • Commit and push the package into a VCS repository.

  • Install the package in a virtual environment locally or from VCS so that you can use it in your other projects with that environment.

Last modified: 26 April 2021