Support sandboxed environment selection for testing frameworks (pytest, uinttest)

[timonviola]

The feature request is to explicitly declare, which virtual environment should be used for tests.

I have sandboxed environments:

• project dependecies (used for editable installs, etc.)
• dev (used during development)
• test (used for tests)

During development I want to set:

"python.defaultInterpreterPath": "${workspaceFolder}/.venv/dev/bin/python"

However, in that case, tests cannot be discovered:

[error] /Users/timon/work/dagcellent/dagcellent/.venv/dev/bin/python: No module named pytest

As soon as I activate the test venv, discovery works.

Note that setting:

"python.testing.pytestPath": "${workspaceFolder}/.venv/test.py3.11/bin/pytest",

seems to have no effect.

---

My .venv looks like this:

.venv
├── my_package
├── dev
└── test.py3.11

I am using hatch, but this can easily be replicated with poetry or other:

[tool.hatch.envs.dev]
extra-dependencies = [
    "pre-commit == 3.7.*",
    "ruff == 0.4.4",
    "mypy == 1.10.*",
]

[tool.hatch.envs.dev.scripts]
install = "pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg"

[tool.hatch.envs.test]
extra-dependencies = [
    "pytest >= 8.0.0",
    "pytest-cov",
    "pytest-mock >= 3.14.0",
]

[icyitscold]

➕ but I just want "python.testing.pytestPath" to work. I have custom pytest wrapper module that setups up paths so it's super frustrating that vscode has this setting but then ignores it

[github-actions]

Thanks for the feature request! We are going to give the community 60 days from when this issue was created to provide 7 👍 upvotes on the opening comment to gauge general interest in this idea. If there's enough upvotes then we will consider this feature request in our future planning. If there's unfortunately not enough upvotes then we will close this issue.

[dacevedo12]

Same here, custom pytest wrapper. Looks like this extension runs everything using https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/blob/main/python_files/vscode_pytest/run_pytest_script.py and doesn't take that config at all

[eleanorjboyd]

Hi! Quick question- anyone know how I can specify which pytest if I am using pytest.main()? I was looking into this issue and yes you are right that "python.testing.pytestPath" so I am trying to get that value to be used but cannot figure out how to use it here:

vscode-python/python_files/vscode_pytest/run_pytest_script.py

Lines 64 to 65 in 567ca5a

	pytest.main(arg_array)
	except Exception as e:

. Currently spinning up a subprocess is not an option as we hit another error if a subprocess is run with too many test ids which is fixed by called pytest.main()