Issue

I have a bunch of projects in my ~/Documents. I work almost exclusively in python, so these are basically all python projects. Each one, e.g. ~/Documents/foo has its own virtualenv, ~/Documents/foo/venv (they're always called venv). Whenever I switch between projects, which is ~10 times a day, I do

deactivate
cd ..
cd foo
source venv/bin/activate

I've reached the point where I'm sick of typing deactivate and source venv/bin/activate. I'm looking for a way to just cd ../foo and have the virtualenv operations handled for me.

I'm familiar with VirtualEnvWrapper which is a little heavy-handed in my opinion. It seems to move all your virtualenvs somewhere else, and adds a little more complexity than it removes, as far as I can tell. (Dissenting opinions welcome!)
I am not too familiar with shell scripting. If you can recommend a low-maintenance script to add to my ~/.zshrc that accomplishes this, that would be more than enough, but from some quick googling, I haven't found such a script.
I'm a zsh/oh-my-zsh user. oh-my-zsh doesn't seem to have a plugin for this. The best answer to this question would be someone contributing an oh-my-zsh plugin which does this. (Which I might do if the answers here are lackluster.

Solution

Put something like this in your .zshrc

function cd() {
  if [[ -d ./venv ]] ; then
    deactivate
  fi

  builtin cd $1

  if [[ -d ./venv ]] ; then
    . ./venv/bin/activate
  fi
}

Edit: As noted in comments cd-ing into a subfolder of the current virtual env would deactivate it. One idea could be to deactivate the current env only if cd-ing into a new one, like

function cd() {
  builtin cd $1

  if [[ -n "$VIRTUAL_ENV" && -d ./venv ]] ; then
    deactivate
    . ./venv/bin/activate
  fi
}

that could still be improved, maybe turning it into a "prompt command" or attempting some prefix matching on the folder names to check there's a virtual env somewhere up the path, but my shell-fu is not good enough.

Answered By - agnul

Answer Checked By - Marie Seifert (WPSolving Admin)

Thursday, March 31, 2022

[SOLVED] How to automatically activate virtualenvs when cd'ing into a directory

Issue

Solution