Including pyrefly binary in extension

[kinto0]

Hi! I work on Pyrefly's VSCode extension:

There's been some buzz around this zed extension, so thank you for your work on this! One issue that has been raised is that it isn't so easy to get started with this extension without pyrefly installed. People will generally have Pyrefly installed through pip or uv, but there is a small cohort of users who may only want pyrefly in the IDE.

I'm trying to think how we can make it easier to use for this cohort:

• what if it pulled the latest release from pip automatically on startup?
• what if it was bundled with the latest release from pip?
• what if it was deployed as part of pyrefly's extension release process and always had a lockstep version with the pip/vsix release?

The 3rd option seems like it requires being part of our repo in order to use deploy_extension.yml. What are your thoughts?

cc @cybardev

[cybardev]

To add some context:

My main issue is that I want to use it in Nix via home-manager. And I can install Zed and this extension just fine. But pyrefly isn't in nixpkgs yet. I tried making a package for myself but failed in multiple ways (especially due to being unfamiliar with building maturin apps in Nix). Gave up and made a package request, hoping someone more experienced to pick up eventually: NixOS/nixpkgs#412559

[zsol]

My (admittedly drive-by) opinion: the extension should use whatever version of pyrefly is installed in the active virtualenv, instead of a system-installed version. That way type errors will be consistent with the project's CI and tools. As a fallback, the extension could ship its own pyrefly binary like the OP suggests - but that would only be used if the environment doesn't have any pyrefly installed, only to get people started

[cybardev]

That sounds good, but in that case we might also need a direnv extension so Nix users who use a dev shell instead of a venv can also use project-scoped pyrefly. At least once we get pyrefly into nixpkgs. For context, VS Code has this: https://github.com/direnv/direnv-vscode

Tho, this might be better discussed elsewhere (maybe on the main Zed repo, not sure).

---

Update

I was able to create a Nix package, but while installing it I faced another issue. Ideally I would use the home-manager option to specify pyrefly in the programs.zed-editor.extraPackages option (relevant lines in source code). But if I do that, I get this error on the bottom bar:

Clicking on it gives me this info:

Language server error: pyrefly

pyrefly must be installed and available in $PATH.
-- stderr--

To get around this, currently I have to add pyrefly to my list of user packages in home-manager. I believe this is not ideal. Should I open a new Issue on this? I think it ties in well with @zsol's comment above.