Pygame Not Returning Joystick Axis Movement Without Display

I've seen other solutions to this problem say that you either need to call the pygame.event.pump() or initialize the joystick outside of the while loop. However, even with these so

Solution 1:

I would probably move away from Pygame unless you need the whole underlaying GL features, as the library is meant for 2D/3D game development. Although it might be possible to use it for these purposes, issues down the line is more or less unavoidable. A perhaps simpler approach would be to go with python's input library, which can handle gamepads (joysticks).

from inputs import get_gamepad

whileTrue:
    events = get_gamepad()
    for event in events:
        if event.ev_type == 'Absolute':
            if event.code == 'ABS_X':
                print(f'Left joystick x: {event.state}')
            elif event.code == 'ABS_Y':
                print(f'Left joystick y: {event.state}')
            elif event.code == 'ABS_RX':
                print(f'Right joystick x: {event.state}')
            elif event.code == 'ABS_RY':
                print(f'Right joystick y: {event.state}')

Solution 2:

Alright found the answer 5 minutes after I posted this. The problem was that I was using pygame 1.9.6 instead of 2.0.0.dev8. After updating, I'm getting the console output without the display window.