Technology Tales

Getting Pylance to recognise locally installed packages in VSCode running on Linux Mint

17^th December 2024

When using VSCode on Linux Mint, I noticed that it was not finding any Python package installed into my user area, as is my usual way of working. Thus, it was being highlighted as being missing when it was already there.

The solution was to navigate to File > Preferences > Settings and click on the Open Settings (JSON) icon in the top right-hand corner of the app to add something like the following snippet in there.

"python.analysis.extraPaths": [
"/home/[user]/.local/bin"
]

Once you have added your user account to the above, saving the file is the next step. Then, VSCode needs a restart to pick up the new location. After that, the false positives get eliminated.

Getting custom Python imports to work in Visual Studio Code

18^th February 2022

While I continue to use Spyder as my preferred Python code editor, I also tried out Visual Studio Code. Handily, this Integrated Development Environment also has facilities for working with R and Julia code as well as Markdown text editing and adding the required extensions is enough for these applications; it helps that there is an unofficial Grammarly extension for content creation.

My Python code development makes use of the Pylance extension, and it works a little differently from Spyder when it comes to including files using import statements. Spyder will look into the folder where the base script is located, but the default behaviour of Pylance is that it looks in the root path of your workspace. This meant that any code that ran successfully in Spyder failed in Visual Studio Code.

To solve this issue, I added the location using the python.analysis.extraPaths setting for the workspace. I opened Settings by going to File > Preferences > Settings in the menu. I typed python.analysis.extraPaths in the search box. This showed me the correct section. I clicked on Add Item, entered the required path, and clicked OK. This resolved the problem, and everything worked properly afterwards.