Cannot create virtual environment in Pycharm 2019.1 with anaconda 3

Question

How can I create a python virtual environment interpreter with Pycharm and Anaconda? The usual procedure doesn't work.

With new Pycharm 2019.1 and Anaconda 3, I am unable to create a virtual environment as required by Jupyter notebooks. Pycharm 2019.1 cannot find a version of pythonw.exe where it is expecting it to create a base interpreter.

Following the usual procedure in Pycharm to create a virtualenv interpreter (not a conda environnment python interpreter)

File->Settings->Project Interpreter->Add->Virtualenv page in pycharm

Leads to the Window Select New environment Location --C:\Users\jackson\PycharmProjects\MyProject\Venv Base Interpreter Python 3.7 c:\users\jackson\AppData\Local\Continuum\anaconda3\python.exe

Leads to the following error

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\Users\jackson\AppData\Local\Continuum\anaconda3\lib\venv\scripts\nt\pythonw.exe'

The anaconda3\lib\venv\scripts\

Answer 1

This may be because of a problem with particular versions of Anaconda. There is more info on the GitHub issue tracker which dates from around the same time as this question.

If that is the case, then running

conda update python

may update the installation and fix your issues.