How to Install TensorFlow on PyCharm?

TensorFlow is one of the most popular open-source libraries for machine learning and deep neural networks in Python—initiated by the machine learning engineers at Google!

Problem Formulation: Given a PyCharm project. How to install the TensorFlow 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 "tensorflow" 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 TensorFlow, just type in “tensorflow” in the search field instead:

Make sure to only select the package “tensorflow” because there are many other packages that are not required but also contain the term “tensorflow” (False Positives):

PyCharm Install TensorFlow

Alternatively, you can run the pip install tensorflow command in your PyCharm terminal view that makes use of the PIP package manager:

$ pip install tensorflow
(venv) C:\Users\xcent\Desktop\Python\pythonProject>pip install tensorflow
Collecting tensorflow
  Downloading tensorflow-2.6.0-cp39-cp39-win_amd64.whl (423.3 MB)
     |β–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆ              | 234.4 MB 3.3 MB/s eta 0:00:58
pip install tensorflow pycharm

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