Among various other advantages, customizing the run/debug configuration of a PyCharm project is helpful when it is a web development one and we would like to specify the default page for our web application, as explained in the previous subsection.
- To open the configuration window, select the following section within the main toolbar of your project window, and choose Edit configurations as illustrated here:
Opening the run/debug configuration
- In the new window that just appeared, enable the Run browser option, and edit the corresponding URL so that it points to our desired default page, which, in this case, is http://127.0.0.1:8000/library and hit Apply:
Specifying the default page for a Django project
- Now, whenever we would like to run the server, we can utilize this run configuration by clicking on the Run button (instead of using the manage.py panel, whose default page is still http://127.0.0.1:8000/) and PyCharm will take us to the page that we specified earlier:
Running a Django server using a run configuration
In this case, we will be taken to the index of our library application and we'll see the Currently at the library index message again.
Note that clicking on this Run button is a significantly faster process than opening the manage.py panel and executing the runserver command. So, even within PyCharm, we still have a wide range of options to achieve the same goal. Most of the time, customizing a run/debug configuration for your web project will prove to be more efficient in the long run.