Since I started writing python last year I’ve spent the majority of my time developing with virtualenv. This is a great way to silo your python environment from system python so you run different versions of a dependency without having to worry about upgrading every app that’s running on your development machine / production web server / etc.
One of the annoying things about working with virtualenv on your development machine is that you need to explicitly "workon" or activate the python environment each time you open a new terminal window or change directories. This got me thinking -why not write a simple bash script that would automatically activate a virtualenv when it found one that matched the directory name.
The above can be put into your .bashrc file if you want this same auto workon behavior I was looking for. The script does assume 3 things
- You only consider a directory that has a git repository
- You must name the virtualenv the same as the directory that contains your project
- You want the script to deactivate one virtualenv and workon another when you switch between different project directories
I decided to be a little more strict about when to auto workon a virtualenv because this script runs each time you execute the "cd" command. So by first making sure you had a .git file and second by making sure the name even existed as a virtualenv on your system it might save some would be wasted effort trying to activate something that wasn’t needed or didn’t exist altogether.