How to separate Work and Personal Profiles in Unified PyCharm? – Support | JetBrains

Question

How to maintain separate work and personal profiles in PyCharm to comply with data management requirements?

Answer

To achieve separation of work and personal profiles in the unified version of PyCharm, there are two primary solutions:

Option 1: Use Separate OS Users (Recommended)

PyCharm stores its settings, caches, plugins, and logs relative to the OS user's home directory (i.e., ${user.home}). By creating and using a separate OS user, it's possible to isolate work and personal profiles.

To run PyCharm under a different user on Linux, use the following command:

sudo -u workuser -i /path/to/pycharm

This provides automatic separation for all IDE-related directories, eliminating the need for additional configuration.

Option 2: Override IDE Directories

If creating a separate OS user is not feasible, it's possible to configure PyCharm to use separate directories for the second instance. Here's how to do it:

Steps:

Create a Custom Properties File: Create a new properties file, for example, ~/.config/pycharm-work.properties, and specify the following paths for separation:

idea.config.path=${user.home}/.config/JetBrains/PyCharmWork
idea.system.path=${user.home}/.cache/JetBrains/PyCharmWork
idea.plugins.path=${user.home}/.local/share/JetBrains/PyCharmWork/plugins
idea.log.path=${user.home}/.cache/JetBrains/PyCharmWork/log

Set the PYCHARM_PROPERTIES Environment Variable: Point to this new properties file when launching the second PyCharm instance. Use the following commands:
```
export PYCHARM_PROPERTIES="$HOME/.config/pycharm-work.properties"
/path/to/second-pycharm/bin/pycharm.sh
```
This ensures that the second instance uses the customized paths, keeping the configurations, caches, plugins, and logs separate from the primary installation.

References

For further details, refer to the official documentation: