Extensibility APIs for environment and package managers in VS Code

[cwebster-99]

Hello Hatch community👋

The Python in VS Code team excitedly announced the Python Environments extension in preview in December 2024! This extension was designed to provide seamless support for your favorite Python environments and package managers, but more interestingly allows you to design your own experience via our APIs. As the Python community continues to innovate with diverse environment/package managers, we recognized we needed to evolve our support and mechanisms to better support the community! Thus, the Python Environments extension was born!

This extension offers mechanisms to interact with various environment managers, allowing users to create, select, and install packages via a UI built-into VS Code. It also enables you to specify environments for specific files or entire Python projects and folders, ensuring flexibility across different project setups including mono-repos. Our hope is that this experience allows you to have a more tailored experience in VS Code using your tools of choice.

While venv and pip are supported as a default, we built this extension with extensibility in mind providing a set of APIs for communities to register their own environment and package managers.

There are a couple of things we hope to raise awareness about:

• You can now build a hatch extension leveraging our APIs : Create plugins that provide support for hatch. This allows other users to benefit from the unique capabilities of your setup.
• We'd love your feedback!: Visit our repo to review the API documentation and share your feedback. Your input is invaluable in helping us refine and enhance these APIs.

In the past members of the community contributed support to our extension and we are so grateful for their partnership (@vscode-python#22779 by @flying-sheep) 💗 These contributions were invaluable for the creation of these new APIs.

Please, do not hesitate to reach out and ask questions about the Python Environments extension or the APIs themselves!

[flying-sheep]

Awesome, I’m happy to do so! Just a question: the granularity of VS Code plugins is getting a bit out of hand. Am I right that you expect us to make a Hatch-specific plugin that depends on the environments plugin which in turn depends on the Python plugin? (And nothing downstream gets automatically installed?)

The ideal situation would be that people install the Python plugin and Hatch integration just works. Every additional step is a flaw IMHO. So how do we get there?

• Will the Python plugin eventually depend on the Python environments plugin (just like IIRC it now depends on the debugger plugin)? If that’s not planned: how can we make it happen?
• Should we push a PEP that has a unified method for discovering environments for a given pyproject.toml project? That way the environments plugin will not need extensibility and sub-plugins at some point, because all anyone needs is that API.

[cwebster-99]

Thanks for the engagement @flying-sheep! You are correct in your understanding that a Hatch extension in this model would depend on the Python environments extension. While the Python Environments extension is in preview we are leaving it separate from the Python extension, but once stable we will ship it alongside the Python extension as we do with the Python Debugger and Pylance extension.

Unfortunately, we cannot install Hatch or a Hatch extension for the user, but something we can do (and plan on doing once everything is in place) is prompt the user to install a Hatch extension once we detect you have hatch installed.

We recently updated our README.md to better depict the relationship between the Python Environments extension and the tooling extension landscape. Hope this helps answer some of these questions as well!