Pylance Intellisense not working as expected with Django

Question

I'm trying to understand how to configure Pylance to make it work correctly in my Django project.

Below is one of many examples where Pylance is not able to find what I'm looking for. Here, I obviously need models from django.db. But there are only theses 6 suggestions below...

Here is what I know or tried:

My interpreter is correctly selected (Python 3.10.4)
Pylance seems to work perfectly with Python (not Django) related stuff.
I'm using Poetry as a package manager, and no virtual env because I work in a self-contained dev container. There is only one python installed on it.
In my VS Code config (using devcontainer.json) :"python.analysis.extraPaths": ["${workspaceFolder}/dj_proj/dj_apps"] -> which works to prevent missing imports. I have no false warnings about missing imports, just the inability to see the right suggestions in intellisense.
I cleaned __pycache__ and .pyc files -> no effect
I ensured there is a __init__.py pretty much everywhere
my sys.path (PYTHONPATH) looks like this (where dj_proj is my django project and dj_apps my apps folder):

['/workspace/dj_proj/dj_apps',
 '/workspace/dj_proj',
 '/usr/local/lib/python310.zip',
 '/usr/local/lib/python3.10',
 '/usr/local/lib/python3.10/lib-dynload',
 '',
 '/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages']

I'm suspecting this PYTHONPATH variable to be messy or not sorted the right way, but I'm not sure.

Any idea on what could be wrong? Thanks!

Did you `from django.forms import models` instead of `from django.db import models`? — aaron, May 01 '22 at 13:57
It's not a typo, I have this issue with pretty much everything in Django. Right now I'm writing `class HomeView(TemplateView)` and Pylance will never be able to import TemplateView from `django.views.generic` by itself. — David Dahan, May 02 '22 at 07:37
This issue on Github is still open. I think there is no way to solve this problem at present. Here is the link:https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/1931 — MingJie-MSFT, May 03 '22 at 01:31

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 12 '23 at 18:12

For performance reasons, you must use the following settings for autocomplete.

"python.analysis.packageIndexDepths": [
    {
        "name": "django",
        "depth": 5
    }
]

Similar settings should be used for each external library (the appropriate depth level must be set because the default is 1)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 05 '22 at 19:31

I believe you should install the Django extension in VS Code. Even though some obvious stuff gets always overseen by the language support, at least that extension contains some useful stuff like pre-made models, CBVs and widely-used imports such as these:

I hope this is useful to you.

Pylance Intellisense not working as expected with Django

2 Answers2