Conda environment folders are not recognized as virtual environments

[rchiodo]

Discussed in #5143

^{Originally posted by Ritesh313 November 24, 2023}
I'm getting "<module_name>"is not accessed warnings from Pylance in my python file while importing all the stdlib modules.
The warning description just says:
conda_env_location/lib/python3.9/<module_name>.py" is overriding the stdlib module "<module_name>"

I have my anaconda environment selected as my interpreter in VS code. I know it's just a warning and not interrupting my code, but I would just like to know if I have something setup wrong. Please let me know if I should provide some other information for this.

Modules which have this warning: datetime, random, typing, argparse
Platform: VS code
Environment: Conda
Python version: 3.9.7

Here's a screenshot of the warning:

[rchiodo]

More details, the virtual environment is on a file share in a linux environment.

[rchiodo]

As a workaround you can disable the warning for now like so:

    "python.analysis.diagnosticSeverityOverrides": {
        "reportShadowedImports": "none"
    }

[rchiodo]

I can reproduce this in a conda enviroment if I open the 'envs' folder:

We don't detect conda environments as virtual environments because they don't have a bin\activate or Scripts\activate file.

We could probably detect this situation, but I don't think this is very common. Most of the time the env folder is tucked away under the home directory.

[msegado]

We could probably detect this situation, but I don't think this is very common. Most of the time the env folder is tucked away under the home directory.

I do know there are also up-and-coming tools like Pixi that prefer to put Conda envs in a project subfolder, so it may become more common in the future. Pixi stores things in {project_root}/.pixi/ though, so it's ignored by Pylance (which excludes **/.* paths by default) and doesn't cause issues.

For anyone else who likes to put Conda envs in a .gitignored subfolder of their projects (like me!), Pylance will happily ignore it as long as you name your subfolder something like .env/ =)