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Auto-detect src and/or test directories #924
Description
Some people keep their source in a src directory and some people keep their tests in test. This seems to up often enough that we should either detect this and automatically do something or warn people they should create a .env file that manipulates their PYTHONPATH to include the appropriate directories.
Activity
DonJayamanne commentedon Mar 1, 2018
We already have some code that looks for directories named
test(or similar) and we display a prompt asking the user whether they'd like to configure VS Code to discover and run the tests.DonJayamanne commentedon Apr 6, 2018
We might want to update our documentation too (see #1328), other IDEs do the same.
Besides that's how python works (using PYTHONPATH)
DonJayamanne commentedon May 21, 2018
I take that back, the auto detection of tests was take out of the extension 99ff84c
I guess this was removed as users found the prompts too annoying.
DonJayamanne commentedon May 21, 2018
If we do go back with the auto-prompt, we might want to make the prompt more subtle. As it is we have a linter prompt. I guess it would be a review of the extension startup (setup) experience.
brettcannon commentedon Jul 21, 2018
https://twitter.com/r1chardj0n3s/status/1019521759156924416 suggests at least on Twitter people like to use
src.eiva commentedon Aug 8, 2018
DonJayamanne commentedon Aug 8, 2018
sloria commentedon Jun 8, 2019
I use
src/directories for my libraries. I think the addressing #4954 would also fix this issue more directly than workarounds like suggesting PYTHONPATH modification.jakebailey commentedon Jul 2, 2019
Steve Loria (@sloria) I'm working on something that will improve import detection when editable installs are used; i.e. if a package has been installed as editable, then the language server will recognize that and add it to its list of user import paths automatically, as opposed to the situation right now where editable installs work but still require extraPaths/PYTHONPATH to be set.
It has the downside of only working if something has been editable installed at all (so not if you just open any project, and is not the same as the original issue filed here, per se), but would that be helpful/in the vein of what you were interested in?
karrtikr commentedon Aug 14, 2019
Please also include the workspace folder directory itself. (the one referred using
PYTHONPATH=.)jakebailey commentedon Aug 14, 2019
If you are talking to me, that's actually already done in the LS; we always have the workspace root as an import path (non-optional).
Also, linking this, since it involves auto-configuration for src directories: microsoft/python-language-server#1440
karrtikr commentedon Aug 15, 2019
I was referring to the person who works on this in general, not just LS. I just noticed that I had to explicitly add
PYTHONPATH=.for tests to be discovered, and it was not auto-detecting modules in the root directory.luabud commentedon Dec 3, 2019
#6544
uchuugaka commentedon Jun 5, 2020
Why close #5710 for this one?
Nobody is going to use src and test directories all the time, it forces an unrealistic directory structure on Python projects.
Seems more like we need the app to recognize local modules the same way Python itself does without going through hoops of setting up additional, unnecessary files.
jakebailey commentedon Jun 5, 2020
This issue is about auto-detection. If you do not use this structure (most projects do not use
src, many usetest), you are not affected. The language server has done this for about 10 months to good effect. Jedi's import resolution is looser, and may resolve things more forgivingly. Other tooling (like linters) may or may not be able to do this yet.This is a pretty difficult thing to get correct in all cases. The biggest offenders are scripts; it's not generically possible to know if any given
.pyfile is intended to be imported from somewhere else or run as a script, nor can we really know from where a user is intending to run their code (where imports are rooted, which we typically assume to be the workspace root). If it's a script, then the interpreter will add the script's directory as a search path. But the editor doesn't know this is going to happen 100% of the time. Tools like pytest may also modify the search path. And if the user has a src directory, or some other format, it can't know for certain if a given import is going to resolve or not.Anything automatic/default is a heuristic to be improved, but the notion of configuring search paths is not uncommon in editors that need to handle Python, as there is no perfect algorithm that can both provide good feedback about errors and handle the wide range of cases.
uchuugaka commentedon Jun 5, 2020
brettcannon commentedon Dec 8, 2022
Pylance picks up on
src/directories already, so closing as outdated.