autovenv

Automatically activate and deactivate virtualenv as you change directories

What

The motivating idea is that venv should act automatically, taking inspiration from git repositories. You don't type source .git/bin/activate and deactivate when changing between repos, do you?

So, this script does the following:

• Navigate to a project dir with a .venv subdir, and that .venv is automatically used.
• Navigate to a subdir in the project, original .venv willl still be used.
• When the project is left, the .venv is deactivate automatically.
• .venv in a nested project is used since it's "closer" to the working path

Why not kennethreitz/autoenv

autoenv by kennethreitz works perfectly fine, but is not as streamlined. This script basically checks if .venv exists, whereas autoenv does that if you first create a .env file specifying the current directory as a project to work on using workon from virtualenvwrapper (you also have to install that as well). And only then it automatically activates, but doesn't deactivate the virtualenv.

So it's a lot more complexity and dependency for less functionality.

Installation

Download the script, add to your .bashrc or profile, then restart your terminal session. The following works in a plain Ubuntu installation, but may need modifications for your system.

wget -O ~/.py_autovenv https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raydarnet/autovenv/master/.py_autovenv
echo "source ~/.py_autovenv" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Now you can go to your project folder, and your virtualenv is activated automatically! Or if not created yet, run virtualenv .venv to create the virtualenv, afterwards it'll be detected and activated automatically.

Usage Guide

Ensure your virtualenv folders are named .venv. If choose a different name, specify in the script's venv_candidates() function.

Credits

Help in development process came from:

• https://nolar.info/automatically-activate-virtualenv-on-cd/
• https://gist.github.com/brianpkennedy/8943902