It took a few attempts to get a compatible Python and OpenCV library running under Visual Studio Code on macOS Catalina using a virtual environment. I made a video to show how I got this going – this post just adds some more details.

There is also an excellent tutorial from Microsoft:

Getting Started with Python in VS Code

Note: virtual machine rendering problem

Visual Studio Code running on a virtual machine may have problems rendering the interface. This seems to be related to the underlying Electron framework and GPU acceleration. I made a quick video to show how I got around this:

Install Python 3.7.5

A virgin Mac comes with Python 2.7 installed – this is not recommended and V3.7.5 works with OpenCV4 on a Mac. V3.8 does not work at the time of writing (although since I started writing this post it looks like it now does). Download the installer from the main python website by selecting Downloads, Mac OS X, and then selecting the 64-bit installer:

Run the installer – I used all default settings.

Install Visual Studio Code

Download the installer from Visual Studio Code and immediately move the downloaded file to the Applications folder. (This is the actual application, not an installer). Try to run once – macOS will refuse due to security:

Close the message, open System Preferences, and select the Security and Privacy settings. Then select “Open Anyway” to allow VSC.

Visual Studio Code should now start:

Configure Python

Open a folder by selecting Open folder and then add a new file. Save the file using the .py extension:

Visual Studio Code immediately offers to install the Python extension, select Install:

On a virgin Mac there will now be a prompt to install command line developer tools, so click Install if prompted and allow the installation to complete before returning to Visual Studio Code.

The status bar will show the selected interpret if everything has gone well:

Install the linter (pylint): this helps analyse the code for bugs and style issues. It also might not work first time but we can fix shortly…

If the terminal window suggests upgrading pip, the Python package manager, then go for it by running the following in the terminal window:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

Make a virtual environment

A virtual environment is a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/venv.html

Each project can use its own virtual environment to ensure any modules it requires don’t clash with modules in other projects.

From the terminal create a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv

Visual Studio Code will detect this new environment and offer to select it for the current project folder – select Yes:

Because this is a new Python environment you may need to install the linter again:

Now – the bit that confused me… the project is now using the .venv virtual environment:

However, the terminal session has so far only created the environment, it has not activated it for itself. The shell identifier says:

jon@Jons-MacBook-Pro Python %

There are two ways to fix this. First, using the source command in the terminal window:

source .venv/bin/activate

Second, by creating a new Terminal session using the command palette. (Select View, ten Command Palette):

Now the terminal shows that it’s using the virtual environment:

Install OpenCV

At last we can install OpenCV. Using the terminal session in the virtual environment we can first search for OpenCV packages:

python3 -m pip search opencv  

When called with -m module-name, the given module is located on the Python module path and executed as a script

https://docs.python.org/3/using/cmdline.html

We see results like this:

opencv-utils (0.0.2) – OpenCV Utilities
ctypes-opencv (0.8.0) – ctypes-opencv – A Python wrapper for OpenCV using ctypes
opencv-wrapper (0.2.3) – A Python wrapper for OpenCV.
opencv-cython (0.4) – An alternative OpenCV wrapper
dajngo-opencv (0.3) – Django Opencv integratio
opencv-python (4.1.2.30) – Wrapper package for OpenCV python bindings

For this test I’m using opencv-python. The details on version 4.1.2.30 can be found on the Python Package Index site. Interestingly this version was only released a few hours ago and says it supports Python 3.8 😬 I guess I’ll try this on a virtual machine first to check it’s all ok!

Install OpenCV using pip:

python3 -m pip install opencv-python

Write some code and fix the linter

First test: import the OpenCV module and print the library version.

import cv2
print('Using OpenCV version {0}'.format(cv2.__version__))

After running this output is shown in the terminal:

But – there’s a problem. In the editor the linter is suggesting that cv2 is not a known module:

This has been seen before on the pylint GitHub issues page. For me, the solution is to edit the .vscode settings. Using ⇧⌘E (shift+command+E) to view the explorer page, expand the .vscode file and click settings.json:

Add a comma to the end of the line of the existing setting, then add the following new setting:

"python.linting.pylintArgs": ["--generate-members"]

My settings now look like this:

And now the red squiggle has gone from cv2.__version__ 😀

All that remains is to learn Python and OpenCV which will surely lead to great things!

Hope this helps.