How to explicitly specify that Pylance only scans specific a few directories in a large multi-root workspace

[vbem]

Hi, I have a large multi-root workspace containing many project-directories, but only a few among them are Python related. Every time a start VScode, the Pylance starts scanning every project-directory in my multi-root workspace, it consumes several minutes before I can work in Python related project-directories.

Is it possible I can limit the directories Pylance will scan in a multi-root workspace? Thanks in advance.

[StellaHuang95]

Hi @vbem, if you don't want certain directories or paths to be included in the analysis, you can do the followings:

1. Open command palette, search for workspace settings.
2. Add the following to your settings:

"settings": {
	"python.analysis.exclude": ["full path of directories or files"]
}

Globbing is supported, so please refer to this doc for more details.

Please use full paths for now as I found a bug with using variables like ${workspaceFolder:<workspace folder name>}. I will mark this issue as a bug and give an update once the bug is fixed. Thanks.

[vbem]

"settings": {
	"python.analysis.exclude": ["full path of directories or files"]
}

Thanks a lot for your guidance @StellaHuang95 . I added other non-python directories (full-path) into python.analysis.exclude of my multi-root workspace settings, restarted VScode, but the scanning on every project-directory still shown up:

[rchiodo]

I believe you need to actually use a glob like so:

"python.analysis.exclude: ["/root/_git/foo/bar/**/*.py*"]

The Starting server instance entries will still show up though. We should just skip the indexing and analysis then.

[vbem]

I believe you need to actually use a glob like so:

"python.analysis.exclude: ["/root/_git/foo/bar/**/*.py*"]

The Starting server instance entries will still show up though. We should just skip the indexing and analysis then.

Thanks a lot for your hints.

But is it possible to disable/enable pylance scanning instances for certain project-directories? Because in a large multi-root workspace with only 1 python related project-directory, user still need to wait all scanning instance done before working on the python directory, which consumes a lot of unnecessary time and resources.

[rchiodo]

But is it possible to disable/enable pylance scanning instances for certain project-directories? Because in a large multi-root workspace with only 1 python related project-directory, user still need to wait all scanning instance done before working on the python directory, which consumes a lot of unnecessary time and resources.

Sorry there's no way to completely ignore a workspace folder. The ignore logic is actually independent of the folder handling.

Internally there should be no scanning. We will create data structures to track those other folders, but then any documents in that folder will be marked as skipped. The only work that should happen is that it finds no source or files in those folders.

[heejaechang]

But is it possible to disable/enable pylance scanning instances for certain project-directories?

you can have folder specific setting for multi workspaces in vscode using this - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/workspaces#_multiroot-workspace-settings

for your specific issue, create .vscode/settings.json in the root that you want to ignore python files completely.

and add

{
    "python.analysis.exclude": ["**/*.py", "**/*.pyi"]
}

any setting in code-workspace will apply to all workspaces so, that place is not right place if you want settings that apply for only some of roots.

[djettah]

add

{
    "python.analysis.exclude": ["**/*.py", "**/*.pyi"]
}

I've tried this but unfortunately it doesn't prevent pylance instances from starting and consequently using a big slice of RAM (around 2 GB for 30 roots) in a devcontainer. Are there any other workarounds?

[heejaechang]

@djettah can you take a look at https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/wiki/Opening-Large-Workspaces-in-VS-Code ?

that should have more detail instructions on how to set up large workspace.