We recently introduced a tool at my team that I’ve been using for a long time and that helped kept my development setup sane like only very few: direnv.
direnv allows you to set environment variables automatically whenever you change into a specific directory. Let’s say, you’re working on something using the GitHub API for which you’d like to use a personal access token. In this case, create a .envrc file in your project’s root directory with content similar to this:
export GITHUB_API_TOKEN="my-token"
When you enter that root directory the next time with your terminal, direnv will complain that there is a .envrc file it doesn’t know:
direnv: error .envrc is blocked. Run `direnv allow` to approve its content.
Once you’ve run direnv allow, direnv will load the content of the .envrc file into a Bash-subshell and expose all the variables set in there to the “host” shell. This has the additional benefit that you can have complete shell functions inside that file and they should work.
direnv also keeps track what variables are managed by it. If you later on move out of that project again, it will unload that GITHUB_API_TOKEN variable again!
The setup is also extremely simple. The following two commands are all I need on macOS with homebrew and ZSH:
$ brew install direnv
$ echo 'eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"' >> $HOME/.zshrc
Give it a try 😁
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂