Installing pyright while avoiding "return non-zero exit status 2" on Windows

Installing pyright while avoiding "return non-zero exit status 2" on Windows.md

Installing pyright while avoiding "return non-zero exit status 2" on Windows

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Workaround for running pyright in a dependency-aware fashion

The advice by @uglycoyote above works, with some caveats. Not that you actually have to run .\nodeenv\scripts\Activate.ps1 instead of \nodeenv\Scripts\activate in his version.

But let's say you have a virtual environment for your project at .venv in the root of the project, with project dependencies (say pandas) in there, as well as pyright installed via pip install pyright. If you had run npx -y pyright out of a separate nodeenv folder like the above solution, it won't "know" about your pandas dependency over in .venv, and will complain whenever it sees pandas in your code.

But it turns out you can instruct nodeenv to fix up your current .venv as follows, which allows pyright obtained from PyPi to run in a dependency-aware way without the "return non-zero exit status 2" error. This is how you do that:

. '.venv/Scripts/activate'
pip install nodeenv
nodeenv -p

Note that pip install nodeenv may be unnecessary, since pyright has nodeenv as a dependency. But let's be explicit.

If your .venv already has pyright installed via pip install pyright or similar, then running pyright at the terminal should work now. Running nodeenv -p modified our .venv/Scripts/activate script, exposing npm and such to the command line. But we are actually just taking advantage of a side-effect that now pyright should work without any additional npm install or npx commands.

More details

Of course you could omit pip install pyright, and instead source it via npm install -g pyright now, which will source Pyright directly from NPM. But maybe you have a requirements.txt somewhere with pyright==X.X.XXX pinned to a version in it (like I do), and you'd like to avoid lugging around a package.json just for a single NPM dependency in your pure Python project. Either way, by manually handling nodeenv ourselves, we sidestep this issue and have pyright run in a dependency-aware fashion.

Remember you have to run . '.venv/Scripts/activate whenever you start your terminal. It's usually a good idea to do this in your terminal profile, like ~\Documents\PowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 for PowerShell on Windows, the equivalent of a .bashrc.

The "Let's just install NodeJS" route

You could also just install NodeJS on your Windows machine, side-stepping nodeenv and pip install pyright altogether. You would source pyright directly from your system global NodeJS via npm install -g pyright. If you want to install a specific version of pyright on a per-project basis, you would have to keep a package.json in your repo that looks like this:

{
  "private": true,
  "devDependencies": {
    "pyright": "X.X.XXX"
  }
}

You would then run something like npm install or npm install --no-save (to avoid writing the lockfile). You would have to make sure the node_modules or node_modules/.bin directory was added to your system path to get access to pyright on command line. If you do your order of operations correctly (activating .venv as well), you can run pyright in a dependency-aware manner like this.

A ground-up example of the first workaround

Here's a more verbose example where I set up the environment and give comments along the way as to the specifics of this example. Your approach will likely vary depending on your tooling:

# Install the virtual environment
# For example, install using the default `py` launcher for Windows, optionally specifying the Python version
py -3.10 -m venv .venv

# Activate the virtual environment, exposing isolated scripts like `pip`, `python`, etc.
. '.venv/Scripts/activate'

# It's usually a good idea to upgrade pip and install the basics like this.
# You might also install your package manager here, like `flit` or `poetry`.
python -m pip install -U pip   # Need to do it via `python -m ...` on Windows for reasons
pip install -U setuptools wheel  # Can just use `pip` directly going forward

# Install the local package in editable mode, along with its dependencies.
# This will differ depending on your package manager of choice.
pip install -e .

# Let's say these are a mix of your package requirements and development requirements.
# In practice these would probably be specified in requirements files, `setup.py`, or `pyproject.toml`.
# Note that we are installing the Python wrapper for pyright here.
pip install pandas nodeenv pyright

# We need to manually run `nodeenv` here to avoid the "return non-zero exit status 2" issue
# The `-p` flag causes node to install to your current `.venv`, modifying '.venv/Scripts/activate' accordingly.
nodeenv -p

# Let's try pyright and see if it works!
pyright