Recently, I’ve been getting back into python development. I came upon the same issue: virtual environment activation. Now this is an already solved problem; you can use an IDE or conda(I’ve heard it mentioned, but haven’t really used it personally).
I didn’t want to go setup an IDE, or conda. I just wanted the environment to be active when I open up neovim, and in neovim’s terminal as well.
So I went on a tangent from doing the actual thing I wanted in python, to trying and figuring this already solved problem.
What I wanted was very simple:
- When I open a python project with a virtual env, activate it
- LSP should still work (documentation | go to definition…)
The first approach I took was just sourcing the virtual env as I’d normally do in the terminal.
This didn’t work because of how neovim handles subprocesses.
Basically when a command like source is called, it doesn’t persist in that sessions environment.
Took a different approach by just reading the virtual env activation script. Found it that its just environment variables setting and unsetting, this fixed part of it. This reddit post helped me solve the LSP issue.
This option was good but not good enough because when I open up the neovim terminal,
the interpreter still defaults to the global one. I didnt want that, because the packages won’t be in the global environment.
I solved this by just appending the virtual envs interpreter to the $PATH
The cherry-on-top, this is completely within your neovim instance,
I was kinda skeptical because, messing with the $PATH can couse issues, but this was a nice finding.
Could I have solved this issue by just using an IDE or Conda, YES. Could I have learnt about how virtual envirionment activation works, absolutely NOT.
Thats the beauty in building stuff for yourself, you get to understand a concept much better.
You can find it at pye.nvim