Look into ways to automatically select environment without specifying python.pythonPath

[brettcannon]

Basically VS Code's design of having only global and workspace settings means there is no concept of a machine-specific setting when teams standardize on a workspace settings.json. That means we should look at ways to let people either specify the exact way they want their environment to be selected without specifying an absolute path or scale back when we write python.pythonPath to settings.json.

One key thing to keep in mind is that environment discovery can be expensive, so we may need to come up with a solution where people can say, e.g. python.usePipenv or something so we know to short-circuit searching in other ways and only use pipenv.

[brettcannon]

This came up in #2125 . This might only apply in situations specifically like pipenv where teams will standardize around a tool like pipenv which will keep the virtual environment outside of the workspace.

[DonJayamanne]

See comments here #2125 (comment)

Summary:

• Complicated (not sure whether this is worth the engineering effort)
• Should wait for VSC to come up with an alternate config system

[DonJayamanne]

(not sure whether this is worth the engineering effort)

I take that back, guess that what needs to be determined and decided. Sorry. I guess we'll need to first come up with some solution and the make the decision.

[DonJayamanne]

also realized we need a solution for the fact that virtual environments have different paths on Windows compared to UNIX (i.e. .venv/Scripts/python versus .venv/bin/python). That alone prevents teams from checking in their

This is already supported, been there from day 1. Added to support exactly the scenario you have mentioned.

[eirannejad]

Thank you all for the feedback on this. I'm not fully understanding the challenges behind this but it seems like in most cases, a python project has a venv associated with it so in most cases VSC can just ask the venv manager e.g.pipenv --venv for the python path. In all other cases it can ask the user for the project python path. In either case, the path should not be saved in workspace settings.json. I'd appreciate any help on understanding the issue better. Thanks!

[brettcannon]

@eirannejad not everyone uses a environment management tool, so there's subtly there. Otherwise explaining is premature as we have not taken the time to write out our own design for the solution yet.

[brettcannon]

#7805 will implicitly take care of this.

[ievgennaida]

same problem

[Arcitec]

@brettcannon This can be closed. I'm on the latest VSCode and latest vscode-python extension. It properly auto-detects the Pipfile in my project folder and auto-selects the correct virtualenv Python interpreter path. No need to touch the pythonPath at all.

[brettcannon]

@Bananaman thanks for letting us know about this rather stale issue. 😅