How to Install dlib on PyCharm?

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Python’s dlib library is a toolkit to create real-world machine learning and data analysis apps.

Problem Formulation: Given a PyCharm project. How to install the dlib library in your project within a virtual environment or globally?

Here’s a solution that always works:

  • Open File > Settings > Project from the PyCharm menu.
  • Select your current project.
  • Click the Python Interpreter tab within your project tab.
  • Click the small + symbol to add a new library to the project.
  • Now type in the library to be installed, in your example "dlib" without quotes, and click Install Package.
  • Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.

Here’s the installation process as a short animated video—it works analogously for Python’s dlib library, just type in “dlib” in the search field instead:

Make sure to select only “dlib” because there are many other packages that are not required but also contain the same term (false positives):

Alternatively, you can run the pip install dlib command in your PyCharm “Terminal” view:

$ pip install dlib

The following figure shows how to use pip to install the dlib package:

Note you may need to install additional libraries such as CMake because Python’s dlib library is only a wrapper around the dlib C++ library. You can check your installation using the following two lines of Python code that print out the version of the package:

import dlib
print(dlib.__version__)

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