Best Practice for Creating GitLab Project

Hello, I'm new to PyCharm Professional and would like to understand the best practice for creating a GitLab based project.  Should I create an empty GitLab project with a readme and clone it to my local?  Or should I create a local git project first and then ????   I installed the Gitlab Project and Gitlab Integration Plugins but am a bit lost on how to get things properly configured.  I'm using Ubuntu 18.04. 

I would like to set up a new project named XYZ and integrate it with GitLab and set up pytest.  I will be creating python 3.x code that will be deployed to Raspberry PIs.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

- Vince