Running a Shell

To run an interactive Python shell you can use the shell command:

flask shell

This will start up an interactive Python shell, setup the correct application context and setup the local variables in the shell. This is done by invoking the Flask.make_shell_context() method of the application. By default you have access to your app and g.

It's just a normal interactive Python shell with some local variables already setup for you, not an IDE editor with code completion, hints, syntax checks, etc.

You can use a combination of creating a request context for the Shell (which flask shell does) and a custom starting script for the PyCharm console.

# Step 1: acquire a reference to your Flask App instance
import app
app_instance = app.create_app()
# I return app instance from a factory method here, but might be be `app.app` for basic Flask projects

# Step 2: push test request context so that you can do stuff that needs App, like SQLAlchemy
ctx = app_instance.test_request_context()
ctx.push()

Now you should have the benefits of flask shell alongside the code completion and other benefits that IPython Shell provides, all from the default PyCharm Python Shell.

In my case (in my server.py I had app=Flask(__name__)) I used

from server import app
ctx = app.app_context()
ctx.push()

Then added this to File | Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Console | Python Console starting script

This also works:

from app import app
ctx = app.test_request_context()
ctx.push()

more on the Flask docs page