PowerShell does not support automatic activation of conda virtual environment

[alexzshl]

It seems that the powershell terminal does not support automatic activation of the conda virtual environment?I am not sure if this is my problem or it is currently the case.

If we need a way to activate the conda virtual environment from the powershell terminal, I hope the following information can provide some help

Anaconda supports powershell terminal.The following is an example of the startup command provided by Anaconda:

%windir%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -NoExit -Command "& 'F:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\shell\condabin\conda-hook.ps1' ; conda activate 'F:\ProgramData\Anaconda3' "

According to the above information, I activated the conda virtual environment in the powershell terminal of VSCode

[karthiknadig]

@alexzshl Our recommendation for now is to activate conda first and then start code using code . in your workspace/project folder. #10626

[karthiknadig]

For anyone working on this issue: If we need to run two commands in a shell, right now there is no easy way to it. We have to use sendText and provide the command string. We need a API from VS to sendCommand, otherwise we have to duplicate shell detection and shell escaping in our extension to send the two commands correctly. Although this issue is for PS only, the activation mechanism impacts any shell that we try to send the command to.

[alexzshl]

@karthiknadig
Thank you for solving some of my doubts. Before I asked the question, I already knew that it was a long-standing problem.

I am not very familiar with VSCode's extension development technology. But I tried to modify the file extension.js to test the command execution

async getPowershellCommands(e){return[`& 'F:\\ProgramData\\Anaconda3\\shell\\condabin\\conda-hook.ps1' ; conda activate 'F:\\ProgramData\\Anaconda3' ; conda activate ${e.toCommandArgument()}`]}

Back to VSCode, it seems to work. The conda environment is automatically activated. Perhaps the path of the condabin folder can be known through conda path, making the command applicable

However, it was so smooth that I doubted what I did wrong. Are there any potential problems with this?If you think this is a repeated and stupid idea, just tell me not to do this and close the issue, thank you!

[karthiknadig]

@alexzshl the right way to do this is conda init powershell followed by conda activate <name>. This is recommended by conda. One of the issues with directly referring to conda-hook.ps1 is that some times we cannot locate condabin directory. So we have to rely on conda that is available on the path. The problem with conda init powershell is that you may need to close and open your shell after running it.

[alexzshl]

As I thought, I did miss something.conda init powershell created a profile for powershell. As you said, the globalized profile may not be what everyone wants, and it does not seem to support powershellCore yet.

I have noticed that the role of profile is completely equivalent to the file conda-hook.ps1:

but the profile does not depend on the file conda-hook.ps1. The operation may be a function already built in conda.exe.Maybe the file conda-hook.ps1 was generated by conda shell.powershell hook.

I ’m not sure if I can delegate the work of the profile to extension(located at src\client\common\terminal\environmentActivationProviders\condaActivationProvider.ts):

async getPowershellCommands (e) {return [`(& "F:\\ProgramData\\Anaconda3\\Scripts\\conda.exe" "shell.powershell" "hook") | Out-String | Invoke-Expression ; conda activate ${e.toCommandArgument()}`]}

But it seems equally effective.

As before, I do n’t know if this is a useful idea, it depends entirely on your assessment.