Fails to find Swift toolchain when upgrading swiftly from 1.0.1 to 1.1.0

[ettolrach]

Describe the bug
When upgrading the swiftly installation to 1.1.0, the Swift extension no longer finds the Swift toolchain, giving an error notification saying:

Unable to automatically discover your Swift toolchain. Either install a toolchain from Swift.org or provide the path to an existing toolchain.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Install swiftly 1.1.0
2. Either open an existing Swift project or make a new one (using swift package init) and open it using swiftly 1.0.1 vs 1.1.0 to observe the difference.

Expected behavior
The extension finds the toolchain.

Environment

• OS: Arch Linux (running on WSL)
• Swift version (output of swift --version): swift-6.1.3-RELEASE
• Visual Studio Code version:

$ code --version
1.105.1
7d842fb85a0275a4a8e4d7e040d2625abbf7f084
x64

• vscode-swift version: 2.12.0

Additional context
Both swiftly 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 use Swift 6.1.3. swiftly installed using the swiftly-bin AUR package (selecting RHEL 9 (ubi9) Swift releases).

[award999]

Thanks for the bug report @ettolrach. If you opened the terminal in VSCode does which swift give you a path?

[award999]

My guess is the swiftly environment is not being activated. https://github.com/swiftlang/vscode-swift/pull/1922/files#diff-13bd9d7a30bf46656bc81f1ad5b908a627f9247be3f7d76df862b0578b534fc6R48 is what we do in our devcontainer so it always activates. You may also need to fully kill vscode to refresh the environment

[ettolrach]

Thanks for the bug report @ettolrach. If you opened the terminal in VSCode does which swift give you a path?

/home/[USER]/.local/share/swiftly/bin/swift with [USER] replaced with my username. The same happened just after restarting my computer, so VSCode would have been fully killed.

[award999]

@ettolrach can you run Swift: Capture Diagnostics Bundle and attach the archive? And this is a fresh VSCode terminal? i.e. you don't see a warning icon because that would mean the environment is out of date

[ettolrach]

That fails with the error "command 'swift.captureDiagnostics' not found" (though I can generate diagnostics when downgrading to swiftly 1.0.1). I'm certain that the terminal is fresh (see below). The output of the terminal commands is identical when using swiftly 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 (except for swiftly --version of course).

Here's the output of the Swift extension in case it helps at all:

2025-11-06 13:22:12.799 [info] Activating Swift for Visual Studio Code 2.12.0...
2025-11-06 13:22:13.620 [warn] Error while running 'swift -print-target-info': Error: spawn Swiftly is currently unlinked and will not manage the active toolchain. You can
run
the following command to link swiftly to the active toolchain:

    $ swiftly link


/home/[USER]/.local/share/swiftly/toolchains/6.1.3/usr/bin/swift ENOENT
2025-11-06 13:22:13.622 [warn] Error while running 'swift --version': Error: spawn Swiftly is currently unlinked and will not manage the active toolchain. You can
run
the following command to link swiftly to the active toolchain:

    $ swiftly link


/home/[USER]/.local/share/swiftly/toolchains/6.1.3/usr/bin/swift ENOENT
2025-11-06 13:22:13.622 [error] Failed to discover Swift toolchain: Error: Failed to get swift version from either '-print-target-info' or '--version'.

[award999]

Do you have you swift.path setting explicitly set?

[ettolrach]

No.

[award999]

And did you try running the swiftly link suggested in the error output? I haven't seen swiftly installed under /usr/sbin before, usually it is ~/.local/share/swiftly/bin, so it may be worth making sure you've installed swiftly correctly https://www.swift.org/install/linux/.

If your PATH available in vscode is accurate so which swift can be found and you don't have a swift.path setting set to somewhere that doesn't exist then there should be no difference finding swift from the terminal or by the extension. So check swiftly is installed correctly and you can run the same commands like swift -print-target-info

[matthewbastien]

@ettolrach We've also seen issues related to swiftly's startup script not setting up PATH correctly when being run from within VS Code's terminal. If you echo $PATH in VS Code's terminal vs your regular terminal, do you see a difference? If so, you may be able to resolve this by moving the swiftly startup script out of your shell profile and into the rc file (e.g. for zsh move it from ~/.zprofile to ~/.zshrc).

[matthewbastien]

Usually the problem manifests as swiftly's bin directory showing up later in PATH than it should be. Which causes the swift in /usr/bin to take precedence.

[ettolrach]

I won't be able to look at this until Wednesday because I'm on holiday away from my computer, but I can say that I only really use .zshrc and not .zsh_profile. I installed swiftly using my regular terminal and not the VSCode one using the AUR package linked above in the original post. You can see what exactly it does when installing by inspecting its PKGBUILD file.