Changing python version in a running VSCode project

VSCode is doing some fancy background work to automatically activate virtual environments, (see: Activate Environments in Terminal Using Environment Variables). That approach has a limitation though: it prevents deactivate from working. Luckily it can be easily fixed

Why I’m still using venv instead of poetry or pipenv

I tried using both poetry and pipenv in the past. But I went back to vanilla venv because quite frankly I don’t see the great improvements the alternatives offer. Changing a running virtual environment or disabling it is painful in all of them. Dependencies conflicts are just as hard to solve in all of them (it’s a problem with python itself, not the package manager). Yes it’s nice to have all the settings in a single pyproject file, but it’s a very minor issue not worth the extra dependencies IMHO. And flake8 doesn’t support it anyway. In the absence of measurable benefits, I prefer to stick to the simplest and most standard approach that doesn’t require extra dependencies. And that would be good old venv.

Changing python version from 3.11 to 3.12 using venv in VScode

I had my project running with python 3.11 and venv on OS X, and decided to switch to 3.12. When trying to deactivate the running environment, VSCode refused with the error

bash: /Users/fritz/.vscode-insiders/extensions/ms-python.python-2024.6.0/python_files/deactivate/bash/deactivate: Permission denied

Luckily the fix is documented in the wiki. With that information, I could easily switch using pyenv

# stop the current running venv and nuke it
❯ source /Users/fritz/.vscode-insiders/extensions/ms-python.python-2024.6.0/python_files/deactivate/bash/deactivate
grep: /bin/envVars.txt: No such file or directory
grep: /bin/envVars.txt: No such file or directory
grep: /bin/envVars.txt: No such file or directory
❯ rm -rf venv

# install python 3.12 and make it default for the project
❯ pyenv install 3.12.2
❯ pyenv local 3.12.2

# create a new virtual env
❯ python -m venv venv

# reinstall the dependencies
❯ pip install -r requirements.txt

# activate the new environment
❯ source venv/bin/activate

# confirm it works
❯ python -V
Python 3.12.2

Then restarted VSCode, to make sure the changes were picked up, and bingo.