How to Automate Python for Visual Studio Code
To create your own runtime environment, featuring up-to-date, secure packages and their fully resolved dependencies you can start by creating a free ActiveState Platform account.
What is Visual Studio Code?
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is an extremely popular code editor from Microsoft, available for Windows, Linux and macOS. Despite the fact that it’s free, it’s every bit as powerful as its big brother, Visual Studio, which helps explain why it’s used by almost 75% of software developers according to the latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey (up from 7% in 2016).
It’s also highly customizable with over 25,000 extensions available from a central repository.
You can use the VS Code Python extension to not only switch between Python runtimes more easily, but combined with support for the ActiveState Platform’s ability to automatically generate and install Python runtimes in virtual environments, it offers developers the simplest way to manage and work with Python. Additional features include:
- Environments: automatically activate and switch between ActiveState Python virtual environments.
- IntelliSense: provides auto-completion, code navigation, syntax checking, and more.
- Linting: perform code analysis with Pylint, Flake8, and more.
- Code formatting: format your code with black, autopep or yapf.
- Debugging: script, web app, remote or multi-threaded process debugging support.
- Testing: run and debug tests through the Test Explorer with unittest or pytest.
- Jupyter Notebooks: create and edit Jupyter Notebooks, add and run code cells, render plots, visualize variables through the variable explorer, visualize dataframes with the data viewer, and more.
- Refactoring: restructure code with variable extraction and method extraction.
To read the blog based on this video ‘How to Automate Python for Visual Studio Code’, head here.
Watch Next: How to use the ActiveState Platform to create an artifact repository
At ActiveState, we use the Platform to build not only our popular open source language distributions, but also custom runtimes for our enterprise clients (i.e. builds containing just the language and packages their project requires). Try it out yourself or get a personalized demo and understand how it can support your enterprise’s open source needs.
Use our Platform to build a custom environment for your next project, including just the language and packages your project needs.
- Choose a language (Python, Perl, Tcl or Ruby)
- Select your operating system (Linux, Windows, Mac)
- Add the packages your project requires
ActiveState regularly pulls packages from each language’s standard open source repository (CPAN, PyPI, etc) to ensure that your open source language and components are up to date, can be compiled from source, and are then verified to work together in a distribution that is packaged for most major operating systems. Go ahead and try our beta today! We are hanging out at our Community Forum to provide support as you explore.
