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Change venvFolders to no longer be anchored to the user's home directory #1479
Description
We discovered during our bug bash that venvFolders exists but isn't documented. Either we leave it, document it, and potentially not make (at least) our pyenv support depend on .pyenv being in it, or we remove the setting and use the documented functionality of pyenv directly.
Activity
[-]Decide about venvFolders[/-][+]Create the venvPaths settings to merge venvFolders and venvPath[/+]brettcannon commentedon May 23, 2018
venvFoldersvenvPathswhich is an array of directories which contain virtual environmentsvenvFoldersandvenvPathbrettcannon commentedon Jul 13, 2018
#2142 is a motivator for
venvPathsavailable.brettcannon commentedon Jul 13, 2018
We may want to consider skipping step 2 and modifying step 3 to only worry about venvPath as the naming of
venvFoldersmakes a little bit more sense in isolation thenvenvPaths.ericsnowcurrently commentedon Aug 2, 2018
For reference: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/environments#_where-the-extension-looks-for-environments
17 remaining items
leifwalsh commentedon Apr 19, 2022
What's the current status of this?
venvFoldersandvenvPathstill exist, and are inconsistently documented:venvPathvenvFolders(but not the fact that it's relative to your homedir)I thought the original plan, to make
venvPathsan array of entries likevenvPathworks today, and to get rid ofvenvFolders, made sense. It's the least surprising (can be relative to${workspaceFolder}or not), and supporting multiple entries makes it work with many tools, other filesystems mounted outside one's home directory or project root, etc. It could be overridden in.code-workspaceorsettings.jsonfiles for projects to provide good defaults in source.Did this ticket just get forgotten about? It would very much improve my company's use cases to see this happen.
Dris101 commentedon Oct 8, 2022
Just got caught out by this again! If using
poetry, setpython.venvPathto the output ofpoetry config virtualenvs.path(might need to change\to/on Windows)thecircleoflifefree commentedon Nov 6, 2022
Any rule of thumb of how I should be using one or the other and both?
brettcannon commentedon Dec 8, 2022
Honestly, yes. We have been very focused in the interim time this issue was opened by completely rewriting the environment discovery code, iterating on the quick pick menu, and then getting an extension API for other extensions to use. Now that's all finished, we can look to try and pick this up in 2023.
leifwalsh commentedon Dec 8, 2022
Cool, thank you!
rhewy commentedon Jan 4, 2024
Should venvPaths exist in version v2023.14.0 of the python extension?
brettcannon commentedon Jan 8, 2024
No; see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/blob/main/package.json for all the settings we support.
raffaelemancuso commentedon May 23, 2025
So, what do we do in the meantime?
Which one of the two should we set?
raffaelemancuso commentedon May 26, 2025
Just to be clear,
python.venvPathandpython.venvFoldersare options of the Python plugin and thus are ignored by the Jupyter plugin, right?eleanorjboyd commentedon Dec 8, 2025
moving to:
python-env.workspaceSearchPathsandpython-env.globalSearchPathsvia the python envs extension. tracking documentation add here: microsoft/vscode-python-environments#1041