If you need to store environment variables for Python that does not automatically get detected by VS Code then this answer should hopefully help you.

I am doing a Data Science bootcamp and need to store a specific path for one of my challenges.

Exporting PYTHONPATH in ~/.zshrc works perfectly when I run the notebook directly from Juypter, however the environment variable is not detected through VS Code.

I created a global file in my home directory from the pwd (present working directory) that I wanted to store in my path:

echo "export PYTHONPATH=$(pwd):$PYTHONPATH" >> ~/.python-env

I opened the JSON User Settings in VS Code and added the python.envFile setting which points directly to ~/.python-env

{
    "python.envFile": "~/.python-env"
}