Why cant VSCode using remote ssh server open file in the same directory?

Question

I wrote a very simple test that is failing:

with open('file.txt', 'r') as f:
    print(f.read())

While the file is very much there, it is giving an error:

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'file.txt'

How am I supposed to setup the VSCode env to recognize the remote file system during execution? It does seem to be using the remote python interpreter.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 24 '19 at 15:28

I found one solution I dont like. If I provide a fully qualified path the file will open, which means the interpreter is not running from the directory the code is in. Is there a way to tell the interpreter to run from a specific, or better yet, the script's directory?

This works:

import os

CWD = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))

with open(f'{CWD}/file.txt', 'r') as f:
    print(f.read())

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 27 '19 at 23:10

You can use "Run without Debugging" and set up a configuration in your launch.json that use the "cwd" setting. That way you can specify where you want execution to take place from.

But if the specific goal is to read a file that exists next to source code I would recommend using importlib.resources to read the file as it will take care of the path resolution for you relative to the module.

Why cant VSCode using remote ssh server open file in the same directory?

2 Answers2